Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder

**Rujul Zaparde** (0:00)
I was a first-time founder, right? I dropped out of school. Like, I cared a lot about what others thought, what my team thought, the leaders thought, right? Like, oh, well, people quit because this person, the story executive comes in and then leaves. I cared what our investors really thought, right? Like, oh, like, how is the board meeting gonna go? Like, how do we, like, paint a positive picture about the business and press and all this other stuff? You care about a lot of these things. And then the second time you really are like, you know what, it's my time.
I just want to build something that people want that like really works.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:38)
I'm here with my friend, Rujul, the founder of Zip. And we're going to talk today about what he's learned as a two-time founder, as well as employee of Airbnb, as well as visiting partner at Y Combinator. So to get us started, what is Zip? What do you guys do? What's your two-line description? Tell us about it.

**Rujul Zaparde** (0:56)
Yeah, so Zip is a procurement software company, and so we provide one front door for any employee in an organization to request a purchase, and we route it for approval across budget and legal and IT and security and all the different teams before connecting into the ERP or financial system.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:13)
You guys have done really well. You were just, you were in the summer 20 batch, and now you're a pretty legit company. I mean, I don't know what the public numbers you can disclose are around valuation or money raised or revenue or employees, whatever you can share. I'd love to hear.

**Rujul Zaparde** (1:26)
Yeah, so the company is about 350-ish people. We've raised about $370 million now, and the most recent round was our Series D at 2.2 billion post last month.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:37)
I'd love to hear the story of FlightCar. Let's set the stage. You were very young, and you started a startup. So take it away. Like, how did FlightCar get started?

**Rujul Zaparde** (1:48)
Yeah, so this was back in like late 2012, early 13 I dropped out of college. And I remember, so this was technically still in high school, really. So my co-founder, you dropped out of freshman year, dropped out of just before freshman year, actually. So and, you know, I remember I called up Kevin, my co-founder, and was like, hey, maybe we should, like, let's do a company together. And, you know, he was like, okay, like, I'm free this weekend. Like, let's chat through ideas. And he was like, I've got to go somewhere, but let's meet up at, you know, I grew up in New Jersey. The local hangout spot, of course, was Panera Bread, right in Princeton, right near where I grew up. And so we agreed on a Sunday to meet up at Panera Bread for an hour before Kevin had to go run somewhere. And we were like, let's just think about the best idea. Let's try to come up with the best idea we can in the hour. And then, like, let's just do it. And he's like, hey, you know, have you heard of this thing? It's called Airbnb. And I was like, no, I've never heard of that. And he's like, well, people are sharing their homes with other people. And I was like, no way, like, really? And we kind of just started talking. We're like, well, people are, you know, what's the most expensive thing you own? Your home. And if people are sharing that, well, the second most expensive thing people own is generally their car. When are they not using their car? When they're traveling. And this is, you have to remember, like, pre-Uber and Lyft, like, really, you know, I mean, they must have been early stage companies at best. And so we were like, yeah, car, you know, we would potentially do car sharing, but at the airport, when people are not using their cars, they're traveling and other people are coming in and, you know, they can rent the car. And so that's how FlightCar was born, free airport parking by renting out your car, fully insured. That was the one liner. That one hour led to five years of doing that company.
And so the second time around, I took a very different approach, but I would really encourage that, like, you know, if you're thinking about doing a company, like, you really put the right level of thought into the idea.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:53)
More than an hour, at least. Yeah, at least more than an hour, yeah. And so, you have all these funny anecdotes. You guys did such a great job of doing things that don't scale. Can you just share some of the anecdotes for how you got your first customers and how you got it off the ground?