Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Delightful Procurement: The CFO That Never Sleeps - Alex Yakubovich from Levelpath

Transcript

Delightful Procurement: The CFO That Never Sleeps - Alex Yakubovich from Levelpath · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
Your company's biggest expense isn't payroll, it's the money
0:03
leaking out because nobody actually knows what they're
0:05
spending. $540 million exit later, this founder went back
0:09
into a market everyone called boring because boring is just
0:12
another word for broken. Say it like this.
0:15
Every single person in your company is already doing
0:17
procurement. Every time someone buys
0:19
something on a corporate card because the official process is
0:22
too painful, that's rogue spend. That's your cash walking out the
0:25
door with no ID badge. Now imagine an AI that reads
0:29
your contracts, flags mismatched invoices, surfaces your
0:32
preferred vendors automatically, and taps your team on the
0:34
shoulder before the money is already gone.
0:37
We used to take a team of people.
0:38
Two weeks of spreadsheet warfare now takes seconds.
0:41
You don't need to have your data perfectly organized for this to
0:44
work. Messy contracts, unstructured
0:46
files, no metadata fields. The AI interrogates all of it
0:50
and tells you what's at risk anyway.
0:52
This is ACFO that never sleeps. So what decisions are you making
0:56
in your business right now that feel like judgement calls but
0:58
are actually just data you haven't organized yet?
1:01
Welcome to AI for founders. I'm Ryan Estes.
1:04
This episode is for founders and operators who want to understand
1:07
how AI is turning one of the most overlooked functions in
1:10
business into serious competitive weapons.
1:13
You'll learn how to stop rogue spending, why your data context
1:16
matters more than which AI model you're using, and how to build a
1:19
product people actually want to use instead of 1 they're forced
1:22
to tolerate. That's Alex Yakubovich, Co
1:26
founder and CEO of Level Path, The AI for
1:29
foundersnewsletter@aiforfounders.co is where real insights live.
1:33
Between episodes, join founders who are done guessing and ready
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1:39
If today's episode sparked something for you, the
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If this episode gave you one idea worth running, please leave
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That's Kitcaster by MO Burst. All right, Alex, welcome to the
2:20
show. Thank you so much for joining
2:22
me. Thanks for having me.
2:24
Yes, I'm very excited to talk to you about procurement because
2:27
it's something I know very little about.
2:29
So please address me like I'm in kindergarten.
2:31
That'll be helpful for me. I'm not too far from.
2:35
I I bet you know more than you think.
2:37
Maybe so, but we're talking about level path.com, which is
2:41
your company and I can't wait to to learn about the the
2:44
incredible growth that you guys have had.
2:46
But maybe we can start off with what we talked about before we
2:49
were rolling a little bit, you know, with with AI, we have a
2:52
lot of discussions about how to build with AI, where, you know,
2:56
AI engineering is going, what we can do.
2:58
And it's kind of like this, this Gray area that everyone's kind
3:02
of trying to feel for the walls in the dark, seeing like what's
3:06
possible. But it's important also to talk
3:08
about what's going to stay the same.
3:10
So let me just tee you up with that to say like, you know,
3:13
nobody really knows where we're going, but some things are going
3:16
to stay the same. Maybe you can take it off right
3:18
from there. Yeah.
3:20
Well, I, I mean, I think if you look at LinkedIn or really any
3:23
article that like it's like full of change, change, change.
3:26
And, and that is actually that is absolutely valid.
3:29
Like there's, I was talking to, we had our company all team this
3:33
morning and we're just talking about that.
3:34
There's, there's never been a change velocity as much as it is
3:38
like the pace of change is certainly faster now than ever.
3:42
And, and that's certainly driven by what is happening in the
3:46
macro environment. And it seems like it's just
3:48
accelerate everything. And so one of the things that we
3:51
talked about at our company is just like, what are things that
3:54
you can anchor on when everything else seems to be just
3:57
like absolutely changing and assumptions changing everything
4:00
like that? Like what, What isn't changing?
4:02
And so, you know, when we have values here, we only have 4
4:05
values here and our number one value is obsessed over the
4:11
customer. And I think, you know, as much
4:13
as like the tools are changing so, so much and you know,
4:16
products are changing and everything is changing all the
4:18
time. What what isn't changing is like
4:21
the companies that are going to succeed.
4:24
And, and you know, frankly, the, the, the people that are going
4:28
to succeed in the companies that are going to succeed are all
4:30
going to continue to just like care deeply about their customer
4:33
and understand their customer more.
4:35
It's just like with the tools that we have, the like
4:39
competitiveness of how much we can help our customers is, is
4:43
that much more like the expectation of how much we could
4:45
do is so much higher. And so I think that's like when
4:49
when people get a little overwhelmed, it's like, well,
4:51
what, what, what is the systems thinking that we could put in
4:53
place to make our customer experience like that much better
4:56
and that much better and that much better.
4:57
We're going to be in a great shape.
5:00
Love that that's, it's really important.
5:01
It reminds me of, you know, when I was making records, you know,
5:04
and it was like Pro Tools came out and it was like, Oh my gosh,
5:07
we can like literally do anything.
5:09
And there was almost a paralysis by like going down these rabbit
5:12
holes of like, hey, maybe we can make this sound like a wormhole
5:15
or whatever. As opposed to focusing on like,
5:18
you know what, what, what song would I make if I had two sticks
5:20
in the woods? Because that's what the that's
5:23
what my audience would probably prefer.
5:25
So if you're obsessing over the customer, how do you kind of
5:29
like resist the temptation of just experimenting ad nauseam to
5:34
see, you know, what can we do as opposed to what does the
5:37
customer want? Great question, great question
5:41
and I and I actually think that the answer is the is the
5:44
opposite. I think experiment saying is the
5:47
key. It used to be that experiments
5:49
were really expensive to do and you know, there would be like a
5:51
lot of side quests and, and focus was really something that
5:55
was super valuable. I actually think right now
5:57
experiments is, are, are so much cheaper.
6:00
They're, they're almost free. And so if anything, I think like
6:04
learning is the like the velocity of learning is one of
6:09
those areas that we need to actually lean into more.
6:12
And so, you know, anyway, I, I think that that's actually
6:15
really, really important. The, the, the question there,
6:18
though, because you have so much choice of what you could do is,
6:23
well, how do you, how do you decide what experience they
6:26
keep, what experiments to do, what experience it?
6:28
And the answer to that goes back to the question of the customer.
6:32
And so, you know, when, when I see experiments being run and
6:35
they're, they're nowhere, they're not like on the path of
6:38
a better customer experience, more value for the customer, you
6:42
know, for what we're doing or, you know, a way that we can
6:45
serve our customers better. I'm like, we're going the wrong
6:47
way, guys. Like we're going the wrong way.
6:49
And a lot of times those, those things are done in a well
6:51
meaning way. Like, and, and I've seen this in
6:54
business, big businesses, small business, whatever.
6:56
Like when you hear people in the room who are like, they have
6:59
this, you know, they have their spreadsheet, they have their
7:01
dashboards and those dashboards, they're like, you know, will,
7:04
will it grow our market? Will it, you know, when you're
7:07
not hearing the words of like how the actual customers And
7:11
what I love to ask is like, name the customer that this is going
7:14
to serve better. You know what I mean?
7:16
And if the the product manager can't answer that question, you
7:19
know that kill, kill the experiment, kill the feature,
7:23
kill, kill, kill, edit, edit, edit.
7:25
But if the answer is no, this like customers would be
7:28
overjoyed by this. This would help make their lives
7:30
so much better. Save them so much money.
7:32
You're on the right track. It's good.
7:34
Let's get to know your customers a little bit, like maybe you can
7:37
talk a little bit about the core functionality of level path and
7:41
then like who are your customers?
7:43
Yeah. OK.
7:44
So we, OK, so first of all, you said you don't know too much
7:46
about procurement and just for, for everybody who might be
7:49
listening or watching, I'll, I'll just say you know more
7:53
about procurement than you think you know more about procurement.
7:56
And the answer if you've ever bought anything, you know,
8:00
procurement, you know procurement, OK.
8:02
And you've probably had to, you know, compare different offers
8:05
and you probably had to in some cases negotiate rates or terms
8:09
for what you're buying. If you've ever bought anything,
8:14
you have done procurement. Now the only difference between
8:16
like enterprise procurement and personal procurement is that
8:20
you're doing it on behalf of your company and you're doing it
8:23
on behalf of individuals who are looking to, you know, to do
8:26
their job. And so that that's pretty much
8:29
it in a nutshell. And usually the dollar signs
8:32
because our customers are a really large enterprises and
8:37
they're, you know, it's like, you know, Western Union,
8:39
American Airlines, like New York life like big, big, big
8:43
enterprises like that. And, and we've, we've like a ton
8:48
of these very large enterprises. And so they're, they're looking
8:50
when they're making decisions, they're not making a decision on
8:53
like, you know what, you know, do I get the, the iPhone, you
8:55
know, so you know, which, which version of the iPhone do I get?
8:58
It's more like, OK, like we're they're spending millions, in
9:01
some cases billions of dollars. And so, you know, making a great
9:06
decision has far reaching implications.
9:08
And not only that, a lot of times they're making mission
9:10
critical vendor choices that are going to determine whether their
9:13
business succeeds or is is slowed down and, you know, and
9:18
in some cases like ends up in the news.
9:19
So this is the the scope of it's just a different scope than a
9:24
personal procurement, but you know a lot about procurement and
9:27
so you want to talk a little bit about like what customers are
9:31
using level path for in the absolutely.
9:35
And this super simple thing is our mission is delightful
9:37
procurement. When when you're in a big
9:40
company and you look go to buy something, it's actually pretty
9:43
hard to figure out how to buy it and what is the right way to buy
9:47
it. So like do I need to go out and
9:49
get multiple bids? Do I need to check for budget
9:51
first? Do I need to do anything?
9:53
And then that goes into all of that has to happen before you
9:56
put in a formal purchase request.
9:58
That happens for like formal purchasing, which usually
10:02
happens in the procure to pay system.
10:03
And then we handle that part as well, which is like the purchase
10:06
request, that purchase order. And then when the invoice comes
10:10
in, you know, the question is, do I pay this invoice or not?
10:13
And again, you're doing all of this too, you and your personal,
10:16
you get an e-mail, you get an invoice and you got to look at a
10:19
bill and you got to be like, you know, what happened here?
10:22
My wife does this to me all the time.
10:23
Like, did you, did you spend this much at that restaurant?
10:27
You know, and am I paying this bill?
10:30
Like what's happening here? And just imagine doing that in
10:33
a, in a big procurement sense. And so when you're doing that in
10:36
a big procurement sense, you sometimes don't even know who to
10:38
ask when that invoice comes in. You got to decide like you got
10:41
to figure out who to ask. Do we have a contract for this?
10:44
Do we have a purchase order for this?
10:45
How do I do I pay this bill? And also is the bill right?
10:49
Like, you know, just because we have this vendor, just because
10:52
we have a contract, did they actually deliver these services
10:54
for us? Are we buying on the right terms
10:56
that we agreed on? All of that is done very
10:59
manually in companies today, often by, by, you know, groups,
11:03
big groups of people. We help them automate that work,
11:06
the work that a lot of people don't really enjoy, you know,
11:09
putting putting spreadsheets together and stuff like that.
11:12
So Level Path automates that entire work stream, helps
11:16
companies save a lot of money, save a lot of time.
11:19
And saves awkward confrontations.
11:21
And I like how you kind of brought it to the kitchen.
11:24
We, we share that, you know it. So it'd be like this, you know,
11:27
my wife is looking at a receipt. She's like, did you spend $250
11:30
on rib eyes? I say, I say no, I made an
11:34
investment in our health and fitness, but also I only spent
11:37
200 and she's like, no, it the receipt says 250.
11:40
I'm like, oh, it was marked 200. So there's a discrepancy that I
11:43
missed. So basically she's playing level
11:45
path to say like oh you got need to go reconcile this with the
11:47
vendor. Yeah, that's exactly right.
11:51
See, you know more about procurement than you think.
11:54
I know a little something about rib eyes.
11:57
Amazing. And you know, what a complicated
11:59
time, you know, I mean, without getting political at all, you
12:02
know, the last couple of years we've had an influx of a lot
12:05
when it in in terms of supply chain and procurement.
12:08
If you're thinking, I mean, you go all the way back to COVID,
12:09
which was a disaster and a mess. But now you have different
12:12
tariffs that seem to change on a daily basis.
12:15
Now you have, you know, oil prices that are kind of going up
12:17
all over the the world and countries.
12:19
So how is how is level path kind of like taking some into
12:23
consideration some of these variables when people are
12:25
considering orders and timing? So we love this, we love this.
12:31
It's because procurement used to be when So I've been procurement
12:36
for a long time. My, my Co founder Stan and I, we
12:39
started a company called Scout RFP and you know, this was like
12:43
2014 and it grew. And so we've been doing
12:45
procurementech for a long time. But when we started in 2014,
12:48
which isn't, you know, 12 years ago isn't both a long time ago
12:52
and not that long ago, people didn't really like, they didn't
12:56
know procurement. They didn't really, it wasn't
12:57
like a hot space. It wasn't that important in many
13:00
people's eyes, not to us, but it wasn't that important.
13:02
And so, you know, we'd go to investors and they were like,
13:04
yeah, procurement. I'm just not that passionate
13:05
about it. Like, I don't see it in the
13:07
news. You see it in the news all the
13:09
time now. All the, I mean, like as soon as
13:12
COVID happened, everybody cared about their suppliers deeply
13:14
because suppliers were like, we can't get you what you need.
13:18
So like, you know, first cut the, the, the, the customers
13:21
that we have the best relationships with are the ones
13:23
that are going to get things supply chain got so important.
13:26
And so anyway, so we, we love how much it's putting the
13:29
spotlight on these people who are often unsung heroes within
13:33
their companies. And so your question is around
13:37
like, hey, like as, as the environment is changing, what
13:41
does that mean for our customers?
13:43
And the answer is because the spotlight is now on them, they
13:48
have to be way faster at reacting.
13:51
And so the days of, hey, this is happening, let me go and spend 2
13:55
weeks of just pulling together the data so that we could react
13:59
slowly to this thing. Those are gone.
14:02
Those are, those are long gone, thankfully.
14:04
And so, but a lot of companies are still grappling with their
14:08
data being all over the place. And so the big thing that Level
14:11
Path does is we help them. I mean, like the premise of
14:13
Level Path is in the past, like procurement systems used to be
14:16
all over the place. You'd have a different platform
14:18
for everything. You'd be spending money to doing
14:20
these things. Some things were integrated,
14:22
some things weren't integrated. And our whole perspective is
14:24
like one platform. We could do all of this for you
14:27
and it'll do everything super fast.
14:30
Like things that used to take weeks now take, you know, in
14:32
some cases like hours or even seconds like that fast, OK.
14:37
And so our customers are looking to react way faster to these
14:41
events that are showing up in the news.
14:42
Like you said, they're using level path to have all their
14:47
data at their fingertips, be able to give that data to the
14:51
business with the recommendation for what to do to when these
14:54
things happen. And and they don't need all of
14:58
the data in a structured way, which was like the thing that
15:01
was happened before. So what happened before is like
15:03
if tariffs hit and you didn't have like a tariff metadata
15:08
field in your contract library, you just didn't know whether it
15:12
was going to have an impact on what contract level path.
15:15
As long as we have your contracts, we will be able to
15:18
tell you what happened. Even if you don't have that
15:20
metadata field, we'll interrogate all of your contract
15:23
metadata fields and tell you about it.
15:25
We'll do that across our entire like data set for suppliers.
15:29
We'll give your suppliers on a page and let you react to like
15:32
world events immediately, even the events that you didn't like
15:36
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founders.co. Now back to the show.
16:35
Incredible and absolutely crucial.
16:37
I mean, what were people doing beforehand?
16:39
They got posted notes and and addressers somewhere between
16:43
departments. Usually spreadsheets, but yeah,
16:47
yeah. You got to call.
16:50
You got to call Fred in in San Diego and make a Fred.
16:53
What? What were we spending on
16:54
shoelaces again? That still happens.
16:58
That still happens. It's and, and you know, we love
17:02
that. We we love coming into customers
17:04
environments in, in what they do, you know, they show us what
17:07
they currently do and we're, we just, you know, we're smiling,
17:10
we're smiling and like implementations are our favorite
17:14
thing because you take a customer who's like doing things
17:17
pretty manually and trying to figure out where everything was
17:20
and who to go to for what. And like you said, calling Fred
17:24
and now they're, they're just running so much faster and are
17:31
able to be a lot more strategic about what they're looking to
17:33
do. They can actually be proactive
17:35
about working with their suppliers as opposed to, you
17:38
know, just trying to keep the lights on.
17:40
Yeah, and again, there's there's so much more math that you need
17:44
to do now. For example, you know, now there
17:46
there's a big push towards reshoring and there's certain
17:48
tax incentives. So being able to have all your
17:51
data in one place, you can say, OK, what is the expense truly of
17:55
like if we reshored manufacturing here and set up
17:57
shop versus how we're deploying now?
18:01
Having a centralized place is, is just priority #1 so you can
18:04
even do the math in the first place.
18:06
That's right, yeah. Incredible.
18:09
You said you've got 4 values. The first one is obsessed over
18:12
the customer. What's another one?
18:14
OK, so the, the four values are #1 obsessed over the customer
18:17
and that's our like that's our number one value.
18:19
It's the one that late we we stress all the time here.
18:22
Second one is a players only. It just has to do with like, you
18:25
know, we look for people who are owners here at Level Paths, that
18:28
people who are constantly pushing things forward.
18:31
And so the third one is elevate our employees.
18:34
We genuinely care about the people who are working here and
18:37
want them to look back on their career and say I grew more at
18:41
Level Path than I did anywhere else.
18:43
A lot of the people at Level Path are people that we worked
18:46
with at our last company scout or work day.
18:49
And those are two companies that like care deeply about the
18:52
employees. And the reason that they're here
18:54
at level path working with us, again, for those of us that that
18:57
worked with us before is because they saw their career grow so
18:59
much and they, they've like felt themselves grow a lot, which
19:03
sometimes comes with pain, almost always, right?
19:06
Like growth comes with pain. But like the people here really
19:10
want to grow. And as they grow, we like to pay
19:12
them more. So that's, that's elevate our
19:14
employees. And then the last one is earn
19:16
the trust of others. And you know, a lot of companies
19:20
have integrity in their values. I think integrity means
19:22
different things to different people.
19:25
Not that there's a problem with that, that value in itself, but
19:28
I think like it's hard when you look at somebody and say, like,
19:30
does that person have integrity or not?
19:32
I think like a lot of times there's, you know, it it, that's
19:35
a harder question to answer. Depends on who you're asking.
19:38
But earn the trust of others. Like, you know, when you talk to
19:42
somebody, you know, whether you trust them or not.
19:44
And so that one is, is pretty clear.
19:46
And it's also like you earn that trust everyday, you know, with
19:49
our customers, with our employees and with our
19:52
investors, You know, we, we work really hard to make sure we're,
19:56
we're earning that trust every single day so that those are the
19:59
four values and they don't change.
20:01
I love that the the the values too.
20:02
It's like really kind of infused with care is kind of the thread
20:06
that runs through all of them and a very high expectation.
20:09
Yeah, Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
20:11
And and it's, you know, they're designed to just clarify for
20:15
everyone in the business what we do here.
20:18
Percent. I would love to learn kind of
20:21
what you mean by being AI native, you know if and how kind
20:24
of AI is deployed in the IDE and what what changes like kind of
20:28
AI components have made to to your platform.
20:31
Yeah. Well, so there's, I'd say
20:33
there's kind of like two things. The first part of being AI
20:35
native is, you know, how do you operate as a company?
20:38
And so the, the like, I think that part is maybe harder than
20:45
even the product, you know, whether the product is AI
20:47
native. The question is when, when you
20:49
have a process, does that process, are you looking at each
20:54
process within the company and saying, how do I automate that?
20:57
And in the past, you know, companies would do this, but
21:00
there wasn't a lot of ways to automate things.
21:02
Like it was pretty hard, right? You'd be like writing code and,
21:04
you know, whatever you would need to do and you'd have to
21:06
really pick the things that you would automate because
21:08
automation was pretty expensive, frankly, and, and in, in many
21:12
cases not worth it. That's that's just not
21:14
fundamentally not the case anymore.
21:17
You can, you can automate probably the vast majority of
21:22
tasks today. And you hear about companies
21:24
that are just like so much slimmer that are Born This Way.
21:28
And so you know what, as a first and foremost, being AI native
21:32
comes with being an AI native company.
21:34
How can you automate things? And everything that we automate
21:36
is in the service of helping our customers, helping how we serve
21:41
our customers. OK, so that's number one.
21:44
And then when it comes to the product being an AI native
21:47
product, I think that one is more you can tell an AI native
21:51
product by the rate of, of how quickly it changes.
21:55
And so this is and, and the reason for that and why it's a
22:00
clear tell is because you know, the models come out like, I mean
22:05
weekly, right? Like there's a, there's a new
22:07
model every week. And so the, a native companies
22:10
are ones that are coming to their customers and saying, Hey,
22:14
there's new capabilities this week because there's a new model
22:17
this week. And here's what you could do
22:19
this week that you couldn't do last week.
22:20
And so that's, that's like the, the thing that I think a lot of
22:25
times you, you could tell like the, the rate of pace of change
22:28
of a software platform is going to determine whether it like it
22:33
is the towel of whether it's a, a native or not.
22:35
And and the two things are related.
22:37
So the a native company, the more a native you are as a
22:41
company, the faster you're going to be updating the product in
22:45
service of the customer. And you know, anybody that's
22:49
worked with level paths for longer than a couple of weeks
22:53
knows that, you know, the product here changes.
22:58
Yeah, you know, and for your your customers, just the UII
23:01
mean it's like you really do have to be on top of the news on
23:04
a daily basis. You go on vacation, you come
23:06
back, you're like, Oh my gosh, what did I miss?
23:08
You know, one of the things that I get really excited about in
23:11
products, part of me is the predictive aspect of, of AI.
23:16
So it's kind of illuminating blind spots.
23:18
So, you know, I'm always concerned of, you know, I don't
23:21
know what I don't know, you know, please, please somebody
23:24
tell me what I don't know so I can learn, you know, which seems
23:27
even more prescient with a, a tool like this where you really
23:30
have to be on top of world markets and events at all times,
23:33
you know, in order to be making really informed decisions.
23:36
Is there kind of a predictive aspect to the the UI experience
23:40
when customers are using level path where it's like, hey, kind
23:42
of tapping on the shoulder like you should probably consider XYZ
23:45
because we're seeing these discrepancies over here?
23:48
Yeah. The the answer to that is yes.
23:51
The only thing I would say that we're trying to be pretty
23:55
thoughtful about is you could do.
23:58
It's very easy to overwhelm customers with notifications.
24:04
And then if you do that, then they just won't pay attention to
24:06
anything. And so just being mindful of
24:12
that level of proactivity. So because because you could,
24:16
you know, you could surface just a tremendous amount of alerts if
24:22
you want to. And so just this is where I'm
24:25
really understanding customers on an individual basis and
24:29
saying like what do you care about?
24:31
And then building, and this is something that Level Path does
24:35
really well is like building a platform that aligns to that on
24:40
an individual customer basis. Yeah, I'd, I'd love to learn
24:44
kind of like, how do you think about this?
24:46
Because especially now, like you're saying, it's moving so
24:49
fast, it's wild. And like if you're on the front
24:52
lines, it can be overwhelming and kind of scary.
24:54
But they're the people that are attracted to that are probably
24:56
like moths to a flame in some aspect.
24:59
But, but you know, just the, the capabilities we have now that
25:03
are growing exponentially is like the reasoning function, the
25:06
the predictive function, the learning function.
25:09
So the longer that AI is with your company and with your
25:12
procurement, the more it knows about, you know, the more it
25:14
knows about your habits and patterns, the more it can
25:17
further recommend. But again, to your point, this
25:19
can be overwhelming and, and frankly kind of scary, you know,
25:23
to to folks that aren't like maybe accustomed to like the
25:26
rate of change right now. So how do you kind of take the
25:29
feature stack of what's possible and kind of, I don't know, spoon
25:33
feed it to customers? Being honest, Ryan, we could
25:38
probably do a better job of the spoon feeding part.
25:42
You know, I, I think the and, and the reason for that is, is
25:46
just, you know, our, our customers do more self selecting
25:49
to like they, they want to push things forward.
25:53
But, but we do have some very large enterprises.
25:56
And so that the question is like, how do you bring, bring
25:58
people more on that journey a little bit more gently than just
26:01
like we're all, we're all jumping here.
26:06
The, I'll tell you our approach to it, although you know what I
26:13
won't say though, I'll tell you what works for us.
26:16
And then, you know, I'll say I've seen different companies do
26:19
it differently. So the two approaches that you
26:22
could take, one is just to like slow things down to the lowest
26:26
common denominator, right? Like try to make as few changes
26:30
as possible until customers are aligned with it and then you
26:33
kind of like move them forward that way.
26:35
And, and we, we definitely have customers that would prefer
26:39
that, that kind of motion of like, hey, don't change anything
26:43
until like, you know, until a lot of things have until, you
26:48
know, we, we've all agreed as an organization.
26:51
And and then the other option is to kind of like make the UI more
26:59
flexible, more flexible and to allow customers to control the
27:04
context that goes in to that UI. And that is, that is that is our
27:11
approach. The only thing I, I will say
27:12
about that is like you it, what we do from a customer support
27:17
perspective is that we work with our, we work with each customer
27:22
hand in hand to try to be like, look, here's, here's what's
27:24
coming, here's what you're going to experience.
27:28
And here's how you can control the context that is going into
27:32
the new AI improvements so that you, you experience it the way
27:37
that you want to experience it. That you, you, you see this a
27:41
lot with like most of the like AI tools like Claude, you're,
27:47
you're able to control a lot of the context that you have in
27:49
there. So what you, what you find and
27:53
what we we really try to explain to our customers and educate
27:56
them on is the more context that you have in there and the better
27:59
you are at managing that context, the better the platform
28:04
will work for you. Yeah.
28:06
What are maybe some complaints folks have had about the the
28:08
platform that led to the most significant changes in kind of
28:11
the dashboards and things? Yeah, great question.
28:15
I I mean, the, so the risk of obsessing over our customers
28:21
that any customer that like, or any company that genuinely cares
28:24
about you're obsessing with the customers is that we are, we are
28:28
constantly bombarded with customer feedback, feedback all
28:32
the time across all of our customers.
28:36
And you know, and, and, and these are again, like really
28:40
large customers and generally we're listening to their
28:44
feedback and we're like, that sounds right.
28:47
Like that. That's, that's really great
28:48
feedback. And so the, the biggest change
28:53
that I think that like I would say we made from when we started
28:58
to now is the amount of flexibility that we're building
29:04
into level path for our customers to be able to like
29:09
genuinely make the system their own.
29:11
So in the beginning it was a it was more prescriptive.
29:16
There was a more, you know, we were like, this is how, how you
29:22
know, level path works and you know, we hope you like it.
29:25
And over time, we've just built in a tremendous amount of
29:29
flexibility for our customers on setting it up.
29:32
And So what we've done as a result is just more like come
29:35
with a template and a perspective, but then
29:39
flexibility for our customers to have their, you know, their,
29:44
all, all their policies, all their pros like procedures, all
29:48
their workflows, all their integrations reflected their
29:51
way. And so, you know, I, I love that
29:55
because customers, customers want to feel like you're, you're
29:58
giving them a consultative approach, But I, I hate saying
30:02
no to customers. And so, you know, and our
30:06
customers know that like we, we as a, as a, as a company, you
30:12
know, we're insecure overachievers.
30:14
Like we just, we love to say yes to our customers.
30:16
And so I think that that's really how push us to be a much
30:19
more nimble platform that has is why we can serve like
30:25
automotive, airline, insurance, you know, banking like we could
30:30
healthcare, Biogen like we can biopharmaceuticals, like we can
30:36
really serve a ton of different types of customers.
30:39
Of it, you know, there's a a sense that the the value of
30:43
software is going to go to 0. And I don't know if I believe
30:47
that, but what would be your words of caution if somebody was
30:51
like, you know what, I'm just going to take two weeks and vibe
30:54
code level path myself. You're, you're probably you old
31:00
enough to remember the like when Benioff was holding the no
31:04
software sign with the, you know, with the cloud and it was
31:07
the, you know, the big, the cross through it 100%.
31:10
And, and, and that was the, you know, that when, when things
31:13
were transitioning from on Prem software to cloud software.
31:16
And but the, the, the sign was like no software, you know, like
31:20
software is dead. And, and I kind of see the same
31:25
thing happening now where people are like, you know, that SAS is
31:28
dead. And then, you know, the, I think
31:30
there's truth to that story. It's kind of like you, every
31:36
company should be asking the question of hey, like what is
31:40
the value of this product? What is the value of this
31:43
contract? And maybe this is the
31:44
procurement, procurement person in me.
31:49
But you know, like I think everybody should look at their
31:51
contract that's coming up with whatever software provider and
31:53
say, do we how hard would this be to build ourselves now?
32:00
And you could, and I think in many, many cases the answer is
32:03
going to be either A, we actually don't need it anymore
32:08
because, you know, open AI quad Google like connected to a, you
32:16
know, they're quite integrated to these different tools.
32:19
Like do you still need certain applications that you bought?
32:25
Probably no. So that's number one is like, do
32:28
you even need this, this thing anymore?
32:30
Number 2 is even if you needed the thing, do you still need as
32:34
many seats? If people can just access it
32:36
from a, you know, a, a native interface?
32:40
I, I would say the answer to that question is no too.
32:43
And then the third question is like, you know, can we build it
32:45
ourselves, which is a question that you were asking.
32:48
And I think that's a really important question.
32:50
A lot of things I think IT departments are going to be able
32:52
to just build themselves. And so for I think the the other
32:56
kind of like underlying question that you're asking is like, OK,
32:58
well, well, can you build, can you build something like a level
33:01
path in can you vibe code that? And the as a company that takes
33:07
enterprise software to production on a weekend, week
33:10
out basis, I like, I think, I think customers should
33:14
absolutely ask that. And we should be building
33:16
software that are, is continuously providing way more
33:20
value than somebody could knock out with a team of, you know,
33:23
like a giant team of agents and like 3 people in, in IT that
33:28
could put that stuff into production.
33:30
Like our goal is to, to be much better than that.
33:33
And that's the value of, right? Yeah.
33:36
Where I really see kind of like the next three to six months
33:39
going is kind of a marketplace of agents where people do spin
33:43
off like very specific agent with skills that they're like,
33:46
you know what, this is working really well for me.
33:48
We could put this into a marketplace and see if someone
33:51
would want that. It does that seem like a place
33:53
of growth for level path because you're going to have a whole
33:56
spectrum of companies, right? Enterprise notoriously move
33:59
slowly. You know, startups move quickly.
34:01
So startups might be pushing the the border of like what they can
34:04
do and they're like, actually, we want to spin up these very
34:06
specific use cases. So in working with them, you
34:09
create very specialized agents that then can go to, so
34:11
basically a bullpen where other customers could be like,
34:14
actually I do want that. And then that's coming into
34:17
their their software stack. I think that'll work really well
34:24
in smaller environments and personal use cases.
34:27
So like personal productivity and things like that.
34:31
I think the, where we'll run into challenges with that is
34:36
with enterprise controls. And so the, you know, in an
34:43
enterprise, you, you can't just like let agents loose that will
34:48
make potentially like make decisions on behalf of an
34:52
enterprise that are not managed centrally by administrators.
34:57
And so I think the, I mean, I, I definitely think, you know,
35:02
we'll, we'll see a proliferation of agents out there.
35:08
I think like the thing that enterprises have to figure out
35:12
is as they're deploying these agents, how do we track A, how
35:18
well they're what, what they're doing and B, how well they're
35:24
doing it across the board. And I think that's that's the
35:29
like big opportunity for companies like ours is to help
35:32
companies set the guard rails for that.
35:36
Love it. Let's go back to the inception
35:39
because this level path is, you know is it's a pretty new
35:42
company and as you mentioned, it kind of it was born on the the
35:47
heels of the Scout acquisition, which was $540 million, which is
35:53
an unbelievable exit. I mean, you're in San Francisco,
35:57
so I know how you guys are, but why go to another project?
36:02
What was it about this problem? I mean, obviously you you really
36:06
understood the the domain very well and you saw the opportunity
36:09
there. But after an exit like that, why
36:12
not boat drinks? You know, we tried.
36:16
Stan and I tried boat drinks for a weekend.
36:21
We couldn't do it. We got bored.
36:23
You said a weekend, one weekend. No, I mean, we, we actually, so
36:28
I'll tell you what what happened.
36:30
We got acquired by work day, which is a wonderful company,
36:33
like just incredible company, incredible people, great
36:36
leadership. And so we, we got acquired by,
36:39
by work day and, and then we went and we, you know, we took
36:42
roles and we worked there, worked there for the next few
36:44
years and it was a great journey.
36:46
We met great people, We learned just a tremendous amount and we
36:50
got, you know, we really got to learn about that.
36:52
But then you, you, you see the world changing rapidly.
36:58
And the bigger thing that for us that we, we just kept going, you
37:03
know, kept going through is the thing that was lacking.
37:08
And the thing that was lacking is like people did not love
37:12
working with procurement. Like it was not a delightful
37:14
experience and our mission, like when when we started, we were
37:18
like, what, what are we doing in the world?
37:20
Like what's making, what would make us better?
37:22
And, and we have this whole like mission of delightful
37:26
procurement. We are like, let's make it
37:27
delightful. Let's not just like make it
37:29
faster, help companies save money or whatever.
37:32
We want them to like love working with procurement.
37:35
We want them to feel like procurement is adding a lot of
37:37
value and making the process faster and making it better.
37:40
And so like we have this idea of delightful procurement.
37:42
We even have these like delightful procurement buttons,
37:45
you know, so we ship to our customers and and that's the
37:49
experience that we want as people are working with our
37:52
customers, which is procurement. We wanted to feel like super
37:56
easy, super fast and super straightforward, super clear.
38:00
So anyway, so we were looking at like, how do we make a blank
38:05
page and how would we start with the blank page and think about
38:09
the whole process end to end from scratch and make it just
38:13
like really seamless throughout. And that's, that's the premise
38:17
behind Level Path where, you know, we're on that journey.
38:19
I still think there's a lot of, well, I don't just think there's
38:23
still a lot of room for companies to go and make
38:26
procurement delightful and help like really revolutionize how
38:31
that's done within enterprises. The customers that have bought
38:35
Level Path all are on this journey of like how do we
38:37
streamline our operations and make us go so much faster and
38:41
automate things. And yeah, anyway, so we were
38:47
passionate about procurement. We're passionate about this
38:48
problem. We had a few years of working at
38:54
a bigger company that we really like, saw at a larger scale and
39:00
got to experience other companies and how they do
39:01
procurement. And we're like, man, this is a
39:03
problem that we just need to go and solve.
39:06
So, you know, that's, that's a long way of saying we love to
39:08
build. We love procurement and there's
39:10
never been a time to build stuff in procurement.
39:13
So yeah, we couldn't, couldn't sit on the beach.
39:16
I've asked that question so many times.
39:18
It's always the same answer. It's just I love the game.
39:20
What are we doing? Let's do something awesome.
39:21
Let's go. Yeah.
39:23
I'm just going to stop asking. I I love this idea of delight as
39:28
being the mission and delight is very difficult to to do from a
39:32
user perspective, especially something like administrative
39:35
task, which you're right, you're like, isn't the thing that you
39:37
got to do and you're time blocking.
39:38
Like, all right. Now what I've been, I'm curious
39:41
about this largely because programming and design used to
39:45
be a big charger for me. Like I'd spend a day doing that
39:48
and I would be amped up with a bunch of ideas.
39:51
There's, there's some aspect of AI augmented engineering that's
39:55
depleting that. Like at the end of the day of
39:57
that I'm left kind of feeling drained.
39:59
And I, I don't know if it's just a, it's just because the, the,
40:02
there's a shift that needs to happen and an adaptation maybe
40:05
just to how we work now. Or if there's something innately
40:08
built into the way that you're working in the terminal or
40:10
you're working with the, the chat interface or using whisper
40:13
flow or whatever. I'm just, I'm really kind of
40:16
curious in my own work, like why did it?
40:18
Why do I have this feeling? So what if you're trying to flip
40:21
that on its head? Like how do we deliver a
40:23
delight? A full experience.
40:24
What does that mean to you? Been.
40:34
Reading a lot about like hospitality and you think about
40:42
going into restaurants or hotels and the delight is a feeling.
40:51
Delight is a feeling. And the, the biggest compliment
40:55
that we get at level path and I look and we got this compliment
40:58
at Scout too. And what we really strive for
41:02
from a product perspective is, is this this sentiment, OK, that
41:07
our customers tell us we hear this like all the time.
41:11
And I just it's like the greatest compliment somebody
41:13
could give. They were like, listen, if I was
41:15
a product person, this is the product that I would build, you
41:20
know, like it's like you took the thing that was in my head
41:23
and you, you made it real. And I think that that is, is the
41:28
same in hospitality too, where you know, like you think of like
41:32
a great restaurant experience or great hotel experience and you
41:35
think of like how, how like the perfect experience that it could
41:39
be. And then you go in the
41:40
restaurant and that's like how you know, how close are they to
41:44
delivering on that and on anticipating your needs on, on,
41:48
on providing your curated experience on, you know, on the
41:52
pacing, on the, you know, on the value that they're providing
41:57
you. And so anyway, when when we
41:59
think about delay, we think about like, you know, what, what
42:02
is the feeling that customers dare use it like procurement,
42:07
stakeholders, administrators, what is the feeling that they
42:10
get when they're using level path?
42:12
And we know when they're like you really taking care of our
42:18
needs here, they're delighted. And we also know when they're
42:22
like, hey, this didn't quite work the way I expected it to,
42:27
whether it was the way it was built or not.
42:30
We're not on the right path there for that particular
42:33
customer. And so we, you know, for us,
42:35
it's like, how do we build a company that is built to deliver
42:42
those delightful experiences all throughout our application?
42:46
And, and I'll tell you, Ryan, the, the great thing about that
42:51
is that if, if that's your North star, if that's your North Star,
42:56
your job is never done because customers will always come back.
43:00
And Bill, be like, that was great.
43:02
I love what you delivered there, But can you also do this, you
43:06
know, and, and can you also do that?
43:07
And, and I, I love that. I love that about like our
43:10
mission is never done. Like we're never going to be at
43:13
a point where customers are going to be like that.
43:15
You that was perfect. That was that there's no other
43:18
jobs that you can do for us that would help us, you know, move to
43:22
the next level. And I think if that's your North
43:24
Star and it's not like, you know, sell the company or make a
43:27
lot of money or go public or whatever, like you'll never be
43:32
done with your work. That's cool.
43:35
Yeah, I, I, I love the emphasis here on open communication with
43:39
customers at Adaptability. It sounds like onboarding, you
43:43
know, if you are getting some generational business and
43:46
they're working out of file cabinets, there's an extensive
43:48
onboarding practice to help them be able to utilize the tools.
43:51
And then once they're in, how do you make them feel good?
43:54
And it, it really resonates with me because a couple of lifetimes
43:57
ago, I was the music director for a jazz club in, in Denver
44:02
and I was the chocolate cake guy.
44:03
So, you know, I knew that there was one spot that was kind of
44:07
behind a column and we were, if we're sold out, man, I got to
44:09
sell that spot. And so as I'm seating somebody,
44:13
you know, they're looking, they're like, kind of like
44:14
there's a column here and I just slot him a piece of chocolate
44:16
cake. Be like, I know this is a tough
44:18
spot, but I got you. Next time here's some chocolate
44:20
cake on the House. Boom.
44:21
You know, you see, like they're like, I'll do anything for
44:23
chocolate cake. Or if somebody has a problem,
44:25
hey, this guy's kind of like making some clinking glasses
44:28
with his, his cocktail over here.
44:30
I'd be like, oh, I can tell that's pretty irritating.
44:32
You know, how about some chocolate cake?
44:34
You know, so it, you know, by by having that kind of like really
44:40
customer focused the light on your radar, it almost solves all
44:45
the problems. Now the the advantage that I had
44:48
being in a jazz club is the product is everything.
44:50
I'm using all the senses. So it sounds beautiful.
44:53
It the, the club looked beautiful.
44:55
The smell from the kitchen was amazing.
44:58
Like it, it was warm and inviting like, so we could
45:00
really capitalize on all the senses.
45:03
You know, with software, you only have a couple of
45:05
opportunities. So like when, when you're
45:07
thinking about delight as far as from using like administrative
45:10
software, is it, is it colour palette goes into that
45:13
organization and what you're what you're allowing them to do
45:17
what you're allowing them not to do.
45:19
You know, how does that kind of, how does a new feature kind of
45:22
pass through this delight filter to make sure that it's it's
45:25
adding and not taking away? And it's a really great
45:31
question. Well, I'll give you an example
45:36
of an area where I think a lot of times we, we get it a little
45:43
wrong and we as like a software industry.
45:47
But I, I harp on this at level path all the time in designs.
45:50
OK, a lot of times designers will, will make beautiful icons,
45:58
the gorgeous, beautiful icons. And then you watch a customer
46:04
use it, use the software and they don't know what the icon
46:08
does. OK, and, and I can pull up like
46:13
pretty much any piece of software and you know,
46:15
especially if it was made by like people who are just very
46:18
much into design and it'll have these gorgeous icons.
46:21
And then you'll be looking at it and you'll be like, I don't know
46:23
what that icon it does, you know, well, like, what is that?
46:27
Is that 3 tennis balls? Like what's, what's the, what
46:30
are they trying to say here? So you have to like kind of
46:32
click around and figure out what it is or hover over it and, and
46:35
that kind of thing. And so, you know, the thing that
46:40
I, I would see when I see that as I'm like, that is a well
46:42
meaning, very thoughtful thing that you did there.
46:45
But either label that icon or get rid of the icon all together
46:49
and just have the label just have the word so that the
46:52
customer doesn't have to guess, doesn't have to click, doesn't
46:55
have to hover over, there's no cognitive load.
46:57
They look at it and they're like, I know what I need to do
46:59
here. And when I click on that, I know
47:01
exactly where, what I'm going to get.
47:04
And, and so your, your question is like, hey, like in a jazz
47:10
club, I, I have so many opportunities.
47:12
And here I, I don't at the end of the day, like the, the,
47:16
you're still going for that feeling that a customer has when
47:20
they're using your software. And there are opportunities to
47:25
either make their life a little, little easier on every page
47:29
across the board or give them opportunities of, of like
47:36
surprising delight. And that's actually one of our
47:40
design principles is surprisingly delightful one,
47:44
I'll give you an example. Like we have an assistant when
47:47
you go into some more projects and, and that assistant, you
47:51
know, has, has, you know, you could type into the assistant,
47:54
you could ask it anything you wanted.
47:55
It's super helpful. But we've built in the ability.
47:59
So when you land on the page, the assistant just automatically
48:03
does something and we let the our users.
48:06
So we have pre confined pre configured what what it does,
48:10
but our users also are able to pre configure what that
48:13
automatic experience is. Imagine going into a contract
48:17
and it automatic, like you click into a contract and it
48:20
automatically gives you a negotiation strategy based on
48:24
your company's playbook. And I mean, like that's, that's
48:29
a feeling that you get where you're like, I didn't, I
48:31
wouldn't have considered that. I wouldn't have asked that of
48:33
the assistant. I didn't know he could even do
48:35
that. And hey, those are some great
48:37
suggestions. You know, we look across the
48:42
board for opportunities of making the the like cognitive
48:46
load lighter and surprising that mud like insights or experiences
48:53
in software that that just does a great job.
48:55
I also think I don't know if you ever use like Quicken, but you
48:59
know, Quicken or DocuSign, they have like a little ping that
49:02
happens. There's like a little audible
49:05
thing that happens when something is signed.
49:07
I just I love those kind of things so much.
49:09
You know, you're it's almost like Pavlonian for me.
49:11
Like you hear that like click and you're like, I, I did
49:14
something great. It's done yeah.
49:17
We, we don't do enough of that in our platform just because our
49:20
customers are, are large enterprises and so we you know,
49:25
they often have their, their sound off but.
49:28
No, I love that. And it sounds like kind of your,
49:30
your definition of delight is kind of like predictable and
49:34
trusting. So that like if there's an icon
49:37
for three tennis balls, it's like, no, just put tennis balls
49:39
there and then people know and then they get what they want and
49:42
that's a satisfying feeling. It reminds me of like when
49:45
you're in traffic and maybe you're at like a stop sign and a
49:48
four way stop sign and the person to your left is like
49:51
waving you on and you're like, no, dude, that's not doing any
49:54
favors. Just be predictable.
49:56
You have the right of way. So you go like if they're trying
49:59
to do you a favor, but ultimately it becomes
50:01
irritating. What's what's delightful is if
50:03
they're just like execute on the expectation.
50:07
Yeah, You know, I'm from the Midwest and I'm from Ohio.
50:10
And so that that hits me like that viscerally hits me because
50:14
we're we're it's like a standoff every time.
50:16
It's like, no, you, no, you. It's like, look, could somebody
50:20
just go like, we've been here for 5 minutes.
50:24
I get it. You're nice.
50:25
I'm out of here. I love it.
50:27
We got a couple of minutes. We're going to enter the quantum
50:30
round. Are you ready?
50:31
Think so. We talked a little bit about
50:33
experiments personally. Are you doing any kind of fun
50:36
experiments with AI you're playing around with right now?
50:38
Yes, of course, just about every day.
50:42
I mean the the thing that somebody recently showed me Co
50:45
work, cloud Co work, and I was using cloud code before like,
50:49
you know, for for everything and then, you know, cloud Co work
50:51
and now I'm like that. Anybody who hasn't tried it,
50:54
give it a go. It's a total playground
50:57
experiment. You'll you'll run experiments
50:58
all the time. Cool.
51:01
Anything specific in Claude Co work?
51:05
You know, so one of the things that I, I, I like people ask me
51:10
to send notes to customers all the time.
51:13
And they could be anything from like this customer is having a
51:15
baby, like send them a congratulations to, hey, like,
51:18
you know, this customer, like I had an accident and they're in
51:21
the hospital. Can you send them like a quick
51:22
note and whatever, like a personal note.
51:24
And so one of the things is just automating that my inbox is full
51:28
of that. And of course I want to send
51:30
those personalized messages. And so just made a way for it to
51:34
when that comes into my inbox, it automatically queues up a
51:38
draft message for me, all pre filled, all ready to go.
51:41
I just review it and hit send. Before it used to be you get the
51:45
e-mail you have to like copy and paste and do all that mishegas
51:48
and it it's like a really small simple thing.
51:52
But again, like helps customers feel special.
51:54
And this is like such a faster thing for me now than it was
51:57
before. Amazing.
51:59
You have a incredible career, so much success.
52:03
Is there a a failure that sticks out that maybe you you learned a
52:07
lot from and you could share with us?
52:09
Yeah, IA very long time ago. This, this something that like,
52:17
I think we, we had a a very, very long time ago.
52:22
There was, you know, I worked with an individual who just
52:25
wasn't nice, who just wasn't nice, but they're super
52:27
talented, incredibly talented. And and they were on my team.
52:32
And, and, you know, I think it's something that people like kind
52:35
of learn the hard way. If you have somebody on the team
52:38
who just like makes everybody else's life miserable, even if
52:42
they're the best performer in the world, you, you got to, you
52:46
can't have that person on the team.
52:48
And so you got to like coach them to be a good team player.
52:51
Otherwise, you know, the team is more important than anyone
52:53
individual and say, hold on to that person for like way too
52:56
long because I was like, there's no, you know, they're so
52:58
important. You know, if you can't lose
53:01
them, they're the, you know, the, you know, the Michael
53:05
Jordan of the team or whatever, but they're not nice.
53:09
You got to, you got to move on, you know what I mean?
53:11
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Michael Jordan wasn't
53:14
very nice, but he got six rings, so.
53:19
I, I, I think, I think the question there is it's about
53:24
like, nice. The thing with Jordan is that he
53:26
pushed everybody on the team to be better and he, he wanted to
53:30
win. And so yes, he was hard on
53:31
people, but like it was out of the spirit of winning.
53:34
You hear Michael Jordan, like the people talk about working
53:38
with Michael Jordan, like playing with him and off hours
53:40
and things like that. He was just an incredible
53:43
leader. It wasn't just about being nice.
53:45
It was like, and that's not what I'm saying either just like
53:47
being being nice or not nice. It's like, what are they being
53:50
nice about? If if they're just making people
53:53
feel bad out of their own, you know, to like make themselves
53:57
feel more important. I, I will never tolerate that
54:00
behavior on a team. If they're, if they're being
54:02
tough on other team members because they're holding them to
54:04
a high standard, That for me is just good leadership.
54:07
And so that's, that's different that that's, that's important.
54:12
It's important differentiation for sure.
54:16
Cool. After a level pass, is there a
54:20
retirement in your future is? Have you ever thought about what
54:23
retirement might look like? No.
54:26
And and look, I, if my I, my wife and I talk about this too,
54:34
like I hope, I hope it's just like level path until I die.
54:37
Yeah, you know, that sounds morbid, but like, you know, I
54:41
don't think it gets any better than this.
54:43
And you know, my Co friend Stan and I talk about this too.
54:46
Like we could retire now if we wanted to.
54:48
Like we're not doing this for for like, you know, to to go on
54:52
a beach and like that doesn't even sound good anymore.
54:55
We're doing this because we love the people that we do this for.
54:58
We love the people that we do this with and we love to build
55:00
the product. Like the product is so cool.
55:03
And so I am so no like I hope there is no after level path.
55:08
I hope I die at my desk. In the saddle, like a real
55:12
cowboy. I love it.
55:14
I mean. You know, I know that sounds
55:15
morbid, but like that would be a happy way to go.
55:19
Cool. I know Tipping Point and
55:21
Partners in Health are important to you.
55:22
Tell us a little bit about them. And so Tipping Point is kind of
55:25
like a mutual fund for San Francisco, the whole idea, but
55:29
it was started by Daniel Laurie, who's the currently the mayor of
55:31
San Francisco. And, but you know, well, well in
55:34
advance and like a long, long time ago.
55:37
And the whole idea was like, there's a lot of organizations
55:39
trying to do good. How do you like put some kind of
55:42
like umbrella on top of them that that can go and fund the
55:46
ones that are doing the most good?
55:47
And also like, if there's two organizations kind of doing the
55:50
same thing, how do you help them combine and do the most good
55:52
together? And, and it really like helps
55:55
coordinate the whole diaspora of, of, of, you know,
56:00
investments that are, that are made and efforts that are made
56:02
across San Francisco. It's really done a world of good
56:04
here. I love that.
56:06
And, and it's also just like a very thoughtful organization.
56:10
You know, it's like clear values and helps like the healthiest
56:14
most companies that are the organizations that are doing
56:16
most good get even more resources to go and drive their
56:19
things forward. I absolutely love that.
56:21
My wife and I are passionate about it.
56:23
And then the second thing is a Partners at Health, if you've
56:25
never read it, Mountains Beyond Mountains, it's about Paul
56:30
Farmer. And it's just like an incredible
56:32
book about this one doctor out of Massachusetts who, you know,
56:38
went and was looking to solve disease in these like faraway
56:43
places and often like help reduce like tuberculosis deaths,
56:48
which is really, really important.
56:50
Anyway, the Partners in Health was the organization that he
56:53
started and they are, they're really like help bring
56:59
healthcare to places that just don't have healthcare.
57:02
And you can read, I think so many deaths could be reduced
57:05
with like things that are technologies that are already
57:08
available today. They're just not available to
57:10
people in these faraway places. And that's the whole like
57:12
mountains beyond mountains story.
57:14
But anyway, I love partners, partners and health.
57:16
I think the work that they're doing is very meaningful.
57:18
And it's more than, you know, when you're giving money, a lot
57:21
of times it's like you're kind of disconnected from that.
57:23
But like, you can tell, like you know, when people need help and
57:26
they're far away, it's super important.
57:30
And we'll link to both those charities in the show notes.
57:33
Last question and this can be answered.
57:36
Yes, no, maybe or I have no comment, but California is
57:40
making their their tax initiatives are making it very
57:44
hard for founders. Have you considered moving level
57:47
path out of California? No.
57:51
No, no. And, and we, and never have
57:53
like, you know, during COVID when everybody was leaving and
57:55
it was like, we're going to Miami and we, you know, my, my
57:58
cover and I were like, look, San Francisco is, is home.
58:02
It's you know, and, and, and California's, California's
58:05
California. But San Francisco for us is like
58:07
a super special place. We love it.
58:09
Love it Alex, I really appreciate your time.
58:11
Level path.com is where you can check out more about Level Path.
58:14
What's the best place for people to connect with you online
58:17
personally? Yeah, well, definitely LinkedIn
58:20
is the easiest. So check this out on LinkedIn
58:23
and check me out on LinkedIn as well.
58:25
Happy to connect. We'll link down the show notes
58:27
as well. Thanks so much, Alex.
58:28
You bet. Thank you, Ryan.
58:29
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