 Hey guys and gals, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 from the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, and as I mentioned, day two of our coverage. And fresh from the main stage, Rajah Hamoud joins me, the executive vice president of products at Coupa. Rajah, welcome back to theCUBE and happy 10th anniversary at Coupa. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. And welcome back to Inspire. We're so happy you're here. It's great to be here. So you're just about coming up on your 10 year anniversary with Coupa. You showed some great photos of your time there, but you've lived the evolution that is this rocket ship at Coupa. It's been an incredible journey. I really couldn't believe at first it's been 10. This is the longest I've ever been anywhere. And I honestly feel more refreshed and excited than even when I joined back in the day 10 years ago. And so much has changed, but also so much has not. The size of course, we were like 60 people when I joined. Product development team was one person in a product, roughly 12 engineers. And fast forward to the scale that's today, it's phenomenal difference. But what has not changed is the core values, how the hustle, how people love working with each other, how we support customers, how we keep stepping up our game, how we believe none of us is as smart as all of us and the community keeps getting stronger and stronger. It's been really exciting journey. The theme of none of us is smarter as all of us. I'm not sure if I got that right, but the idea is you feel that when you're talking to Coupa partners, I've had the opportunity to talk with Coupa partners and customers and Coupa folks that that is not just a value statement. People are living that. Yeah, it's everywhere in the company walls, outside the company walls. You often see product people in different organizations where they start living in an ivory tower. They think they know everything. I mean, back to what we were discussing earlier about Barbara when she talked about get out of your doors, right? A lot of people can tend to do that. We always from the beginning believed in the best ideas are out there and you collaborate with each other. And I truly, truly believe that the success that we have achieved today to our community is in a large, large part because we believed in that. So like on Monday, we hosted, I can keep track of the number now, so, so many in parallel community advisory board meetings and just talking to the product managers and everybody is buzzing with new ideas. And when we go back, there's so much new innovation that has just been co-created here in this conference. And this keeps going on and on and on. Yeah, I like how you call it the community advisory board. I'm safety hearing cab is customer advisory board. But what Coupa has built, especially with the launch of the moonshot, the community AI is just that. It's a very collaborative community. One of the things that's around here are hashtags everywhere, but hashtag united by the power of spend. What does that mean to you as the EVP of products? And what do you think that means to the community? When I think what we are doing, we're building this platform that is powering all these businesses out there. And the reality of it is, you can only, only do so much when you try to do things alone. When we are doing things together, we are way more successful. We are more profitable. We're more sustainable. We are more efficient. And community that AI from a technology standpoint is making that happen because what we are doing is taking AI, applying it to all this 3.3 trillion in data and then bringing back prescriptions that we give back to each and every customer so that everybody can see where they are, how they up their game, and we connect them with other people like them. Now, people love coming to conferences like this, but even in conferences like this, if you think about it, the people you're going to meet, it's some people are going to do matchmaking, but you're also losing an opportunities of meeting the maximum number of people who've done exactly the thing that you did. But when you have the ability to look at all of that data and you can matchmake people, so we did that already for sourcing professionals. So if you are somebody who sourced a certain category, we can tell somebody else has done something like this in this geography and we offer you to connect to each other. So this is incredibly powerful way where we are really uniting the whole community by spend, making everybody truly stronger together. Matchmaker in a sense. It is matchmaking. But it's- Spend matchmaking, but it's also the opportunity to unite professionals across sourcing, procurement, finance, treasury, to your point, and Rob said this in his keynote, and he said it here on theCUBE, we've got to break down these silos. People and companies functioning in silos are not going to be successful. Yes, this has been one of the things that we were talking earlier, what has changed, what hasn't. This is one of the fundamental things that has never changed as I've done. The vision has been very clear. The execution on it of how we drive successful business spend management program is by breaking down the silos and this idea of sweet synergy. Where in product you start building these capabilities that helps these professionals and the different organizations to actually connect on the touch points where things really matter. Sweet synergy, was that something from a concept perspective? Did that come from the community in terms of CUBA going? This is actually what's happening, this synergy across the BSM suite. Yes, so in the very beginning, it was early idea, I would say in the first two inspires that we did, we hadn't given it actually the name itself and we used to call it unified capabilities. And it started with the first silos we broke down. The first silos we broke down were procurement and AP and they didn't even used to talk in the same room or even want to care about each other. So we started building so many capabilities that brought these teams together. And little by little, the community started to feel that and see the value of that. And then the community started to ask us to go break down more silos. So in the beginning, I would say the vision before I even joined, the company was on that trajectory and the early customers saw that and they championed it and then they drove us to do more. So they came to us and said, could you please do what you did here in contracts? Could you please do what you did here in sourcing? And I was in a meeting last week, a leadership meeting and one question was asked to leaders in the services team about what are they hearing about from the customers around the particular area? And it was music to our ears when we heard the customers are asking for more synergy, right? So they even have the name for it and they're asking for more and more. And we have built hundreds of these already but the reality is there is so much opportunity. The world is siloed, no technology has attempted to do that. And I think that's what's exciting is to go and forge new grounds and do something very special to unite everyone together. You guys talked about the waves, Rob talked about the waves yesterday, you talked about it again this morning. And when I think of inspired community as that third wave, I see it on both sides, I see the inspired community that is the Coupa community but also what you just talked about, that flywheel of that sort of symbiotic relationship that you guys have with your customers as Coupa in and of itself being in a community inspired by the community that it has built. Yes, it's a circular effect, we inspire one another and we strengthen one another and it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing. One of the special things that we're starting to do is we want to take the whole product experience itself to be a complete community experience. So anywhere you are going to Coupa, what it makes sense of course, you are not only looking at your data, you are getting connected with people for that particular thing. So we've done that already for 15 different product areas and we're constantly doing more and more and more and more. You can imagine one day where we can start within the product pages themselves where we host community experts to talk via video and connect with others. So you bring that whole community experience alive in a product and enterprise software, which has not been done. Kind of creating your own influencer network. Yes, yes, yes, and give people their voice and it becomes exciting. It is very different when you're just working on your own and driving goals and you have no idea how good that compares in the world. And then when right then and there you get to learn that some people have hit that, some people have achieved these goals, you just get excited. I want to hit that goal too. Who are these people? Connect me with these leaders. Let's have a conversation. How did they do it? And they start creating best practices together. We even have started places where they collaborate in actual documents and templates and they put them in the community exchange as a way for people to share with others. Even taking templates from the product, putting them back into a community exchange. So it is sharing being enabled on the platform itself. How did you guys function during the pandemic the last two years when we couldn't get together? I know that your customers are really the lifeblood of Koopa and vice versa but talk about some of the things that Koopa did with its customers by video conferencing for example that really helped the evolution and some of the innovations that you announced this morning. When we first, when the pandemic first hit I think we all didn't believe what is going on. And there was this, I would call it a beautiful period in a way despite how horrific that was. And that period was where everyone rose to the occasion. Everybody wanted to help one another. Across Koopa everywhere we started having documents of how can we step up and help our customers, help our communities. We started to look at how we get PPE and get it in the hands of our customers. We have access to suppliers. We started looking at helping suppliers with digital payments to speed things up. So so many things we started doing as a community to just help each other. And then as we got to the next levels then we started of course starting to do things over Zoom. And the big surprise was we were incredibly productive. If anything we were worried about people feeling burnt out because they were just in it, completely in it. And it created a lot of new avenues for us because often you go and do these meetings in person. Now you could have a user experience session with a customer very easily. They're available more often than they used to. So we did not miss a beat with the community. We moved into virtual caps. We had the advantage of having them recorded as well where we could have the global development teams learn and see exactly what the customers are co-creating together. And our go lives accelerated because a lot of these implementations they used to happen in person, so schedules, they actually got accelerated through that. Now of course, there is nothing that matches to this. You can do it, you can do a lot, but a ton of the collaboration comes from real live dialogue and conversation. So it's that balance between the two that I think will be great. What are some of the things that you've heard the last few days you mentioned? Partners summit and the community advisory boards on Monday, yesterday, everything kicked off today. What are some of the things that you've heard in your meetings that really inspire you on say the next 10 years at Koopa? By far, by far, by far, it's a validation of that what we are doing is absolutely on target with them and that we just can do so much more. The silos are massive and there are so, so many opportunities that you hear in every different areas that we could be doing this. We could be doing this together. So we can break down more and more silos and using community.ai is just the tip of the iceberg of what we are doing. Yes, we created tens and tens of capabilities helping the community with all of that, but data drives everything. And when you look at that, every single process in every single silo can be informed by the power of data within your own company and then even better data across. And to the point where we're talking about concepts that customers are really excited about, even thinking about this community, they're customers of each other. And when you are a customer of each other, what are the different ways as a community you can help on another mode? So we're talking about community netting as new types of concepts. Talk to me a little bit about that. You mentioned the community netting this morning, but I didn't quite, help me understand that. It is very simple terms is if we're buying from each other and we have to do money movements. Every time I have to pay you, I have to incur fees and likewise, but since we're part of this community, we can manage that relationship. So we just pay the delta, we net it out. So it saves reconciliation times, it saves money movement, and these are tip of the icebergs of these very cool things that we're doing together. Wow, that's fantastic. Last question for you, as you talk with prospects who are in their early stages or still determining, do we go through like a supply chain digital transformation? I mean, I think companies that probably haven't now are need to get on the bandwagon. What are some of the things that you advise to those customers to be able to do what Mick Ebling talked about this morning and that is commit and then figure it out. Yes, the number one thing is just make sure you don't do the analysis paralysis. There are just so many opportunities, so many opportunities. Start with a project, get going, and it creates incredible momentum and then you can move on from one to another to another to another. Instead of trying to just go for a year or two, trying to look at how the world has changed in that process, and so often you could see that projects pay for themselves within the first month of Go Live. You do that, you'll create another one, and it's not like you are coming in to do something so new, nobody has done hundreds and thousands as a matter of fact of other community members have done that. It is proven, so get started with those and then continue. Other things I will be talking to them about is to make sure that they understand the way we work is all about partnership spread. Often people who haven't worked with us in the enterprise software, they're used to working with vendors. We're not that, we never were that. The number one, if we're not going to be real partners, honest, transparent, and work with each other, we don't waste each other's time. Well, Raja, it's been great having you on the program. We really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Congratulations on your 10 years at Coupa. Thank you. I'm excited to see what the next 10 years brings for you. We appreciate your insights and everything that Coupa is doing in partnership with its customers is very evident in an event like this. Thank you, and thank you for coming and covering us as well. It's our pleasure to be here. Thank you. For Raja Hamoud, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Coupa coverage day two of Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas.