86. AI for Procurement Teams.

I spent 10 years of my life leading Procurement and Vendor Management teams.I loved the job. You get to learn something new every day. If you lead procurement for a large organization, you are dealing with various different needs and therefore industries and suppliers. From real estate to office supplies, from SaaS to Staff Augmentation, from Cloud Hosting to Cyber Security, from Translation Services to Event Planning… you name it.The biggest challenge for any procurement organization? to really understand the need of your internal stakeholder, and therefore product or service that best suits such need.Easier said than done. Procurement teams are typically understaffed and overworked and need to jump from one deal to the next in lightspeed context switching. And you are dealing with suppliers and vendors that sell the same thing over and over and over, so you are under-trained compared to vendors and sometimes you don’t even know what questions matter most to decide what solution to choose.Enter Teem, an AI-powered supplier sourcing platform for procurement teams, that automates supplier research, RFXs, and consolidation insights for technology sourcing and procurement teams. An esteemed friend and colleague from the Procurement world introduced me to Ben Mappen, CEO and Cofounder of Teem, and I am glad he made the connection. Prior to Teem, Ben cofounded Armory, a DevOps platform that raised over $80M in VC funding and exited last year. Ben has led and scaled Sales, Customer Success, and Product teams to drive growth and innovation.So this became a conversation around the future of work for Procurement teams, but also about Ben’s past and future as an entrepreneur and startup founder.Many lessons here about these topics.Enjoy!