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Tracy Young: Welcome to Path to Growth. I'm Tracy Young, co-founder and CEO of Tiger Eye. Today we are joined by Rose Unis, founder and CEO at Sudozi. Welcome.

Rose Punkunus: Hi Tracy. Thank you for having me here.

Tracy Young: So before we go into your incredible prayer, having served as CFO at Uber, I want to go back to your roots. Tell me about growing up.

Where were you raised? Tell me about mom and dad, what you learned from them.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah. Thanks for bringing me back to the day. So I was actually born in Shanghai, China. I came to the US with my parents when I was three. My dad was actually a cancer researcher at the University of Rochester. And so we lived a very, I would say typical graduate postgraduate student life.

There, a family of three in a one bedroom sort of grad dorm, like apartment. And they were in their late thirties raising me in a new country and my dad actually had the opportunity to do a little. Career shift. So he went from being a cancer [00:01:00] researcher to actually a practicing pathologist, and through that, went through a couple different institutions, did his residency, fellowship.

So I grew up in Rochester, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, Morgantown, West Virginia, and ultimately went to middle school and high school on Long Island in New York. As you can probably expect through that journey, the culture was very different in our household as well as in the neighborhoods we were in.

And, I know we'll get to, tech companies, startups, growth later, but I think that experience, not realizing at the time, but that experience of just growing up with all sorts of different. Really no expectations, right? This is just like everyone is going through all these different moves, meeting all these new friends, having all these different foods and cultures and holidays and so that was really a great foundation for me to get exposure and just be really hungry to learn about different types of cultures and different types of people through those.

First, I'd say, 12 years of all moving around,

Tracy Young: you served as. [00:02:00] CFO of Uber during some crazy years of Uber, early 2013 through 2017. What's your like. Can you share some stories from that term? And there's so many questions I can ask you here, but I do wanna talk about your current endeavor. So tell us about that time.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah let's fast forward. So just a quick clarification I did run global pricing and then I was a CFO for the Uber, US and Canada business. So we had spun out, so regional estate annual, still multi-billion dollar p and l. But happy to, dive into that. I. Join Uber. Really. If there's a rocket ship, just get on, don't ask about what seat you're on.

And so I had an incredible opportunity from leaving, actually. I had an incredible role actually at Apple too. I was running analytics for the TV and movies business on the iTunes platform. And through that had really interesting pricing experience, particularly consumer pricing, different currencies, global consumer pricing.

And so as Uber [00:03:00] was scaling and thinking about. Different products, right? Like it was just Uber black. So how do you launch Uber X? How do you price Uber X? How do you price Uber Pool, Uber Eats, things like that. I had the opportunity to lead pricing at Uber, so it was really a one woman show. I was deep in the models, both from a coding perspective as well as in Google Sheets and then had the opportunity to build out the team, and there was an fp and a team there.

And I think ultimately, there was just, we worked very closely. There was more. Strategy and collaboration with the general managers in each of those each of the cities that were actually running the city day to day. And so from that experience, running pricing, having that collaboration with the different business stakeholders helped me ultimately land that role when the business was large enough to have these, these titles and those regional CFO roles.

What was hard about pricing Uber. Oh, what wasn't hard about pricing Uber. So I'll just start with, macro [00:04:00] and then we can get down to the real micro, right? At a macro level how it's a marketplace even for black car. It's a marketplace, right? Like, how do you convince the drivers to come onto the platform?

You have to be competitive with their other options, which are booked rides usually with, very pricey rides to the airport, to different events, et cetera. But they had a lot of downtime. And so how do you value, how do they value that downtime? Is it like, Hey, I'll just pay $1 more than nothing.

Or is there a fixed cost? And so understanding the trade-offs and the opportunity costs on the driver's side. Then on the rider side we'll just talk about black car for now, right? What are your options? Okay, you have to do all this coordination, you have to go book a ride, et cetera. But as you come down market to maybe taking the bus, maybe taking a taxi, which is a good comparison, but if you think about like everyday trips, it's really against car ownership, right?

And what is the cost of that? And so on both sides of the market, figuring out what. Is the opportunity cost? What's the willingness to come onto the platform for [00:05:00] the drivers, and what's the willingness to pay for the riders? And finding that middle ground in a general market. So I'll give you an example.

In Boston at least during the time I was there, historically, low unemployment rates. People were getting jobs left and right. It was very hard to attract drivers and attract good drivers to stay on the platform for a period of time. So our base pricing just had to be higher. And you're right. In Boston would've been more than a different, think about a different comparable city.

So that's at a macro level. Then of course as Uber got larger and there was more volume, the data science team launched surge pricing. So I wound up be a, being a PM and helping to stand up that product and that program because there's a science, but then there's a ui, like what does Tracy see in her app when she opens the app?

And so when we get into that. More granular pricing. Then you have geolocations. I'm not sure what part of the bay area you're sitting in now, but it should probably be surging at a different level than like financial district or the [00:06:00] marina and different times. So you have all these different dimensions layered in.

So you very quickly as a, I'm talking you're probably assess, it's like it's a very data heavy and a technology problem. But ultimately one of my big learnings out of that experience running pricing is so much of it. Is the user experience. How does the rider or driver feel when they're presented with this option and how do they react and how does their behavior change moving forward?

And one of the principles at Uber was really always have availability, even if it's surge like 10, 20, 30 x always have ability. And that was a cultural trade off the company made. And sometimes that. You could argue that might not have been the right decision, right?

Because you have such an extreme emotion towards that price that it might have negative consequences for future revenue and for future brand or other aspects of the business. So very multidimensional [00:07:00] question, but that helps to give you a little flavor of it.

Tracy Young: Oh my gosh. Did we get a flavor of how complex it was?

And still is. There's, each trip is unique with different locations, different distances, and you have search pricing and different times making it one of the most complex usage based pricing models. I've heard of, but you had 10 to 20 different revenue streams that added up to hundreds of billions of dollars that you're managing.

This isn't just an Excel exercise, it, at least not in the revenue side. How did you hand or. Revenue forecasting. Uber's very complex pricing with so many different revenue streams. Because I'm sure you were reporting these numbers up the food chain at some cadence monthly, quarterly, and what are the key insights that helped you manage such a large and growing business?

Rose Punkunus: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I don't know if you realize this, but this actually is a great question leading to my current company, Sudozizi as well. But just, zooming out every company has, whether you're. [00:08:00] An engineering product company or services company, every company has ways that they're generating revenue, right?

And you're tracking those metrics at a log level. What is this comp customer doing? What did this count? And every company has that, almost every company has some sort of investors, whether even if they're wholly owned by one individual, right? There's. Someone from the outside that wants to know how the company is performing.

And so really the role of finance and the, part of my team's job is to help make those conversions and help make the data digestible to people who need to understand what's going on in the business. So there was an fp and a team that actually you should look at their, I don't know how large their models got.

Like literally there was like. A tab for every city and we got to like several hundred cities. And so that was not sustainable. So I had the opportunity partnering with our CTO to actually build a finance data science team. So we hired. True machine learning at the time? No jet AI yet. True machine learning.

Data scientists hardcore, Python, [00:09:00] really like building systems within the finance team to gather all the data from our production data, convert it to financial metrics, and then convert it to aggregated metrics that the fp and a team could actually use for investor presentations and things like that.

So at a high level, that was the workflow. And I actually want a quick anecdote. Remember talking to auditors about how this data, pi, this data got flowed through. I'm sitting there with like D wc. They're like, so when the search multiple gets calculated, when does it, what's the SLA for it to get to this system?

And could the customer actually get billed a slightly different rate? And all these like. Nuances because there's so many handoffs of the data, right? To get it to this aggregate nice Excel model thing that needed to be presented. So in, in between you had all these data systems on just collecting, not even forecasting, right?

Just collecting the data and summarizing the data. And as you get into forecasting, that was absolutely a machine driven. Solution. Of course, you can always drag [00:10:00] some Excel files across and have a high level summary of revenue, but the actual, CD level revenue forecast, all of these forecasts were really algorithmic model driven.

And actually that's what led me to have the opportunity to build. We call it, I spend internally where let's say there's a price for a ride that's $10. The way that Uber ran was you had these decentralized teams, whether in Boston, New York, Austin, and the GMs actually had the ability to decide Hey, there's something going on this weekend.

We really need to encourage drivers to come on. So we're gonna give them a promotion of $2 per trip, extra earnings if they do a trip between this and this hour. Those decisions are being made in isolation. That data is not being transferred to the finance team manage hq. If it is, it's packaged in an email or hip chat and not in a structured way.

And it's lopped across, right? Oh, by the way, we're gonna spend $2 million on this promotion in Chicago this weekend. And so this is going on every week across hundreds of [00:11:00] cities. And so the scale of that is just not manageable. And you wind up dropping things, your forecast becomes completely inaccurate.

Because not only are you spending money, but that spend changes behavior, right? So you had this cyclical effect. And so in addition to promotional spend, different local teams were spending on other things, right? They were buying their own software, they were buying office supplies. And so the need to understand both the revenue forecast as well as the expense forecast was really, that was the first time I had started building something.

Similar to what we have today at the company, but really to assist in the forecasting and the visibility for the executives and for anyone you know that needs to know about what's happening in the business.

Tracy Young: Thanks for sharing all that. You have such a strong background in data science and even product management and finance.

How do you think these skills have shaped your approach as a founder and CEO? Obviously, you've decided to solve some problems, and we'll talk more about Suzi in a second, but just how [00:12:00] has it shaped you as A CEO?

Rose Punkunus: I've always been really data-driven and the opportunity I had to work on some. Application design or even, I made some decisions on, we used to have, people used to have the iTunes, like desktop app, right?

Like that used to be a thing. The opportunity to work on some of that has really changed my perspective of data. Actually. I think that. Very analytical people can make the data say anything. And so there is actually a stronger need to have a prior, to have a belief. I'm not saying I've figured this out perfectly, but it's that balance of being data-driven but not naively data-driven on what you know, just the metrics say.

And I think there are a lot of questions that need to be asked, even if you are using the data. Is this data representative of what you're trying to decide in the future state, right? [00:13:00] How is this data generated? Is it actually representative of the time period that you're trying to collect? And so there are all these questions that actually come to mind having these different perspectives.

As a product manager you're making the prioritization, you're making a best guess based on both the actual, quantitative data as well as information you're seeing from other departments or other, outside, other customers for sure. Having these other roles have actually made me put less weight on the data itself and be maybe a more holistic leader in making decisions and helping, grow organizations.

Tracy Young: We get to work with so many leaders through our company, tiger Eye and. Many times it's surprising, but we've learned this in the last year. The leadership's already made their strategic decision and they're just using our platform to find data to back up the decision that they've already made.

Yes. So tell me about Sudozi and why this problem is important to you.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah, so after Uber, I [00:14:00] did have that experience with, spend management understanding expenses at Uber. Personally, I had the opportunity to go back to an earlier stage company. So just for context, I joined Uber, it was 400 and something employees.

Really s series B, almost series C startup, and in the four years I was there, grew an incredible amount. I, could not be more thankful for my opportunities there, but really I, I wanted to have more of that startup experience. And so I had an opportunity to join a company called Funbox.

I. As a VP of finance role, so it was the most senior finance executive at the time, to really round out my finance skillset. What I realized at Uber was like, sure, I can do some of the data analysis, forecasting, strategic side of finance, but I actually had no clue about accounting or, what month end close was and accruals and allocations and the, and some of the ERP work.

So I had an opportunity to oversee a full finance team, including the month and close process, the investor relations. Equity fundraise. And so that was a great experience. One thing that came back to me there was like, Hey, we have [00:15:00] no way of getting visibility to our new vendors and our spend.

And by the way, we've told our partners we're gonna be. Monitoring them from a security perspective for all these things. And so what's the best process and for the executives to even have visibility for new vendors that the team's bringing on, especially software vendors. And so we, at the time I looked around, there was, some AP tooling and then of course there was Google forms and internal workflows that I could stand up.

Did a lot there and moving forward to this other company skill factor. And I had an opportunity to be CFO at very similar experience. When I joined as CFO, there was a stack of invoices and bills we had to pay. And I would say, okay, where's the contract for this? I don't know. It's in some executives inbox somewhere.

How do you know that you're supposed to be paying this? How do we know as a company we're obligated to pay this? And that disconnect of information was just really startling to me in how. It was not just me as I talked to other CFOs like, Hey, have you solved this? There wasn't a clear answer of how to solve it.

And if I, think of [00:16:00] this, if I back up, like every company has. Primarily three groups of entities they deal with. One is customers, one is employees, and one is third party vendors. And software vendors are a big chunk of that for customers. You have your CRM, even the youngest companies, right?

Even my early stage company has a CRM. We're tracking pipeline. We have visibility to when things are likely going to become customers or not, or what the context is. You have visibility and then you have the invoice you send out. On the employee side, you have applicant tracking, you know who's applied to which roles, which roles you have open.

You, you have that data structured in a way before they become an employee. Now, if you look on the vendor side, definitely things are changing, but, three, three and a half years ago when I started this, I. A lot of companies were still doing all their procurement over email, right? Hey, I'm gonna, one employee isolated, not tracked in any sort of digitized system is going out, engaging with a vendor, [00:17:00] potentially even signing a contract, and then suddenly finance oh, I had this a hundred thousand dollars invoice.

Like what is this? Where was my visibility before this? Like, how could I possibly include this in my forecast? I didn't even know this was happening. And so really I thought there was an opportunity to. Build simple, lightweight systems to digitize this experience of capturing vendor data. Think about building a pipeline for your expenses and understanding when those expenses, especially the big ones are coming and automating those renewal workflows and these things that really can be automated instead of having more staffing to manage AP and manage the vendor relationships.

Tracy Young: Yeah, and as the company grows and you're just using more tools. Just because there's more people and there's more needs.

Rose Punkunus: Right.

Tracy Young: This becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. So I totally get what you're trying to solve with pseudo really cool. And you're like the perfect founder, CEO, to solve this.

Thanks, Tracy. Tell me [00:18:00] about culture. Tell me about, the types of people you look to recruit in the team culture that you're trying to build.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah I've been really fortunate at both Sudozi and my prior teams to really have just incredible individuals and leaders at the company, even though we're, at a, such a small.

Size. So our, first few employees were folks that I had actually previously worked with at Uber, and it was, their second degree networks of the next tranche of people we've recruited. And I think there are a couple different ways to express culture and what is culture? Any one thing is just, when I'm not there.

What is happening, and that is representative of the culture. It, of course, it can be stated and can be, documented, but it's, when I'm not there saying we need to do X, Y, Z, what's actually happening? And of course for me, and we're a hybrid company, like the communication needs to be there, right?

Like the respect for other teammates, the respect and understanding that. Work is one [00:19:00] part of their life, but still, that doesn't mean you can't be committed to, to work and deliver great work product, right? So communication on personal needs, what you can deliver, what you can't deliver, right? Being able to.

Express to product, to marketing, to sales. Hey, this may not be what's best for the company at this point for X, Y, Z reasons. So really having an open culture of communication and not reacting strongly to anyone's thoughts or opinions, but being transparent. So that's something I, I really valued in this current company as well as in prior companies.

And I could go down the list of other things, but I would say the communication is certainly one top one. Yeah.

Tracy Young: As CEO, what are your most important responsibilities to your team? So when you are there Yeah what's, like the top things you're doing for them?

Rose Punkunus: Yeah. I wanna make sure that I am listening to them.

And actually also, Craig, this is a great question. I'm curious to hear your responses too, because you've had so much, you've had such great [00:20:00] experience and this had much larger companies as well. I wanna make sure that I'm supporting. The team in doing their best work, right? Is their time at work the most productive they can be?

And ultimately is supporting our customers, our employees, whatever the objective is of their function. And if there are roadblocks, if there are things getting in their way, I. I think it's my job to do what I can to minimize those inefficiencies or distractions in delivering their best work.

So that, that's one of the things that I think is my core job working with the team members. And then I think the second aspect that I try to do as best as I can is insert data that one. Function may not know that's relevant for some of the decisions they're trying to make. And how this manifests today is, I am the one mostly on external calls, whether it's customer calls or prospect calls or just in conferences.

And so I. If there's a product feature that's slated [00:21:00] for, let's call it two weeks from now and it's gonna take up X percent of engineering time, and suddenly we have all these like really high likelihood opportunities that may have some different need. I think surfacing that information for the relevant teams, that ultimately the decision is still theirs, right?

Like I think my job as CFO, of course I can share information, but. I do think, like the reason we hire people we grow is not to like, make those decisions ourselves. At least that's my opinion, right? And so my job in those interdisciplinary conversations, or a decision that may require additional information, is to actually bring as much that I can to the table and let the leaders that, we've hired and we've brought onto the team, actually make those decisions.

And sometimes, most of the time I believe we're going the right way, but sometimes they're. They're maybe not the most optimal at the time. But I think that the learning is actually super important too. And continuing to have that trust and that open communication can be more important than [00:22:00] a single decision in isolation.

Tracy Young: I love that your first immediate response is I'm here to listen to the team and then the way he described culture I'm filing it away in that. What is the team doing when I'm not there? That is really the culture of the company and I want them to be actually doing all the right things, making decisions, treating each other with respect, getting stuff done.

It just sounds like a really healthy, productive place. So what's your long-term goals for pseudo?

Rose Punkunus: Yeah, we're in the procurement orchestration space now. I think in the next few years. This is really still. I think like IDC just put their stamp and approval on this as a category. Historically companies, every company has a bill pay system, right?

But that's not necessarily the system to help you manage the strategy, the pipeline, all the collaboration that's required. And every company has some sort of AP system, whether it's outta your bank directly. Some sort of invoice management system for bill pay. Or even as you get larger, these like procure to [00:23:00] pay systems that I would say the opportunity here is really context for payments.

And you think about the payment reels and the trillions of dollars being moved between companies, like context of the payment is so important to future money movement. And so what we see as an opportunity is, today we are helping companies. Orchestrate the approvals for these vendors, whether it's it approval, legal approval, finance, et cetera, having all that context in one place.

But ultimately, and what we're seeing our customers ask for is actually being able to just pay the vendor directly in our application. I have all this context for the vendor here. Why do I have to go to my bank or this other portal to just push a button and move the money? And so we see the opportunity to actually have the money move it, and the money rails.

In the place that is orchestrating the decision to purchase that vendor. And then if you move further down from there, thinking about, then you can have budgets submit, right? And you can automatically detect budgets and give alerts and reforecast. And so [00:24:00] there's a lot more automation in the office of the CFO world.

But in the short term, this procurement orchestration and having a procure to pay inside of one decision making platform is already like a. Huge market. There's a lot to build. So we've got a lot on our roadmap even in the short term.

Tracy Young: Yeah, and it's such a natural, obvious extension for your current product space.

Of course, you're gonna be able to predict spend really easily. That's something that Tiger is trying to do and it is hard. To predict what the company is gonna spend, but you actually have the contracts and exactly when these things are expire, and you know when they're coming up for renewal.

Yes. So trust in leaders can be made or broken when things get tough. How do you deal with the crisis?

Rose Punkunus: First is to actually take maybe 30 seconds and not react. I think the 30 seconds of non-reaction. I've gotten feedback on this it's actually [00:25:00] lowered the resistance of other people to deliver bad news to me.

So if, you come to me, you tell me you close a $2 million deal, or you come to me and you tell me, you lost a $2 million deal. I think my reaction in the first 10 to 15 seconds might be the exact same. And so having that predictability and stability of reaction to a chaotic situation, I think can help.

Facilitate that communication throughout the company, but then from there, like acting very quickly. And so having the data, and not in a frantic way, but really just. As logically as possible, prioritizing the next steps that can actually mitigate a situation or help improve an outcome of a, of opportunity.

I think those are the things that should be thought of and executed next. I think sometimes there's, there can be a lot of. Ruminating and saying things to say things and saying things that have happened in the past that are, that feel really intense, but don't really have a productive [00:26:00] action moving forward.

So those are things that I think are important to minimize and not to minimize anyone's feelings or not to minimize anyone's opportunity to express themselves, but really to focus more on, okay, what can be done? Should we be collaborating and writing a statement that goes out? Should we be really, getting some pizza and getting like a better UI and doing a hackathon to fix this bug. So what is the productive nature of this chaotic situation, this chaotic news? In without a specific event that, that's generally how I've dealt with. I would say every situation varies, right?

It could be personal chaos, it can be, company revenue, chaos, and so trying to be as clear minded as possible but we're all humans.

Tracy Young: Yeah I really think that is really key here. Just giving it some space, whether it's 30 seconds or even just a night to sleep on it. 'cause as you said, we're all humans.

It's, there's gonna be an emotional component to a crisis. Yeah. And it might be easier to get over the [00:27:00] emotions so that you can be, as you said, clearheaded, about what are you gonna actually do to deal with them. Yes.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah.

Yeah,

definitely. And. I would say, like I, I personally do tend to bias towards action after that, right?

Like digest in the information, collect, survey the situation. But then try to action, I, that's something I'm not saying I get it all right, but I do try to do something about it in the coming day or two or whatnot in that

Tracy Young: situation. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's this wonderful Winston Churchill quote, which is when you find yourself in hell.

Keep walking, you're gonna find a way out of it. Don't stay there.

Rose Punkunus: Do not stay.

Tracy Young: Yes. Yeah, that's right. Tell us about one person who's helped you become the leader that you are today.

Rose Punkunus: Oh, wow. There are a number of fantastic examples, but I will actually, and this may be controversial, I will have to say like Travis Knick has done.

A lot in my leadership, both just [00:28:00] creating the opportunity for me to have the role that I had and launch pricing models launch my maybe like simplistic, naive algorithms out into the world of rider and drivers. That was, maybe he didn't even realize a level of scale and trust that like I didn't quite have the opportunity to do before, even though I felt confident I was capable of doing it and really teaching me about leadership in a way where.

You don't have to have the title right? An analyst can come up with the best idea, can come up with the best model. It really should be the quality of the work and not a title or not some sort of hierarchical situation that determines what the best answer is. That truth seeking and empowering people who are doing great work, who are working really hard for the objective of the customer.

Again, the employee, whatever the the objective may be in that project. And so for me as well as for other people in the [00:29:00] organization, there were certainly people on the marketing team, on the growth team, on engineering that were really highlighted and given a lot of opportunity based on their work and the product of their work.

Tracy Young: Yeah, I imagine he hired a lot of great people. As we're hearing now on this podcast, what did you learn from Travis?

Rose Punkunus: I also learned some things about what not to do and I think he was also put in very tricky situations too, but there were absolutely interpersonal. Leadership opportunities that I would've managed differently than he had.

And seeing, how those manifested in that world. And, um, really great, that didn't happen to me as a leader, but now I know, like I've learned from that situation. The other thing I'd say I learned about this experience from Travis and from other leaders at the companies.

When you're growing a company to a certain size, even it doesn't even matter, even like a couple million of a RR, that company is unique. [00:30:00] And yes, you can go hire some revenue leader or you can go hire some finance leader who's done sort of a lookalike company. But every company is unique. And one of my biggest, like aha moments there was at one point Uber hired several executives from very well known Fortune 500 companies from very public.

Government organizations and they just flopped. They weren't bad people, but they just flopped in that culture and in that environment, and so understanding that hey, sometimes I may be, the youngest person in the room, but that doesn't mean. I'm gonna be any less qualified and this person who has, 30 years of their resume at this x, y, z hot company, right?

So just really understanding like the uniqueness of each organization and what is needed from a talent perspective at that time was something I really took away. Had a front row seat to and during that

Tracy Young: growth. Rose. This has been such an amazing conversation. I've got so many mental notes I've followed away from myself to think about, so thank you so much for sharing your experience and just [00:31:00] your career and your wisdom.

One last parting advice for our listeners. What's something that people early on in the career should be doing more or less of?

Rose Punkunus: Thank you for that question. Again, I'll caveat, this is my personal opinion, right? I think that people earlier in their career should be taking more risks. It's gonna be the cheapest time to take that risk.

And what I mean by that is, you come outta college, you have a job, sure it pays you a salary, but that salary is likely gonna be the lowest salary you have in your career, right? That is the lowest opportunity, time to go and mess up and learn about yourself and learn about other professions, learn about other careers.

One of the things I did before Uber when I was in the Bay Area doing a different job was actually I took some time to be a volleyball coach and I actually I joked to some of my investors. Some of my hardest conversations were with parents of. Bay area teenage girls, and that has been the best [00:32:00] prep for investor conversations that I've needed to have.

Going to tell a hot VC that his daughter is not gonna be playing in the next game is a pretty tough conversation. And so the job I was working now was paying pilot 50 60 KA year. And so taking different risks and really learning about yourself in that first, five, 10 years after college can help you get on the.

I would say best path for you in future years of your career.

Tracy Young: Oh my gosh. I can't believe I didn't know that you were a volleyball coach briefly at the start of this interview. Okay. I do have an a follow up question to that.

Rose Punkunus: Okay.

Tracy Young: Yeah I think we can all imagine like the worst part of that job getting yelled at by, I don't know, your sound parent.

Oh, for sure. Yes. Tell me about the best part about being a coach. What does a great day look like?

Rose Punkunus: Oh, the best part. So many best parts. So I because I wasn't a career volleyball coach, I often coached to, they call like the second string, right? And so you [00:33:00] have these top, in the school district or in a club, you have these top 12 girls.

They make the first team, but there're enough girls who wanna play to support team two, team three, team four. And so I often, because I was doing this sort of like for fun part-time, I often got like the second. Team of a club to, to coach this go. And they're all wonderful girls. All, played really hard too.

And I, the proudest moments I had as a coach was really, these are 14, 15, 16-year-old girls. They're growing in so many different ways, right? Like volleyball is not like they're only thing. And so having the opportunity to influence. Their perspectives on life, their life, their, the priority they put on schoolwork versus relationships, how they manage relationships, how they become friends with people.

They're competing for a playing spot with, so those are the personal growth as well as the athletic growth that I was able to have influence on is for sure, like the biggest win, maybe even compared to some of these [00:34:00] more fancy tech wins. That I've had,

Tracy Young: and I'm sure you get something very similar to the team you're building too over time.

Rose Punkunus: Yeah, absolutely. To see people be able to launch features, build, build different structures, build items that these public companies, fortune 500 companies are using in their workflow it, it's extremely rewarding to, to see.

Tracy Young: Rose, thanks so much for joining us today. We should definitely do this again 'cause I could talk to you for another two hours, but thank you for joining us.

Rose Punkunus: I get to interview at some point too. We'll have to do that as well.

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