Cofounding Coupa: Cofounding Coupa: Lessons on Building a Billion-Dollar Company | Coupa Cofounder Noah Eisner

Noah Eisner didn’t set out to chase the hottest market trend. He left a stable role at Oracle in the late 90s to build something few would call exciting: procurement software. But that decision led to cofounding Coupa Software, a category-defining platform that went public at a $1B valuation and later sold for billions more.

In our conversation this week, Noah shared what he learned about spotting opportunity in “unsexy” markets, leading through growth, and knowing when to walk away.

If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about:

• Contrarian bets can be the smartest ones.bIn reflecting on starting Coupa, “enterprise software wasn’t hot at the time,” Noah said. “It was more consumer. Being a little bit of a contrarian created a vacuum in the market — and we could take advantage of it.” Leaving Oracle to build Coupa wasn’t about chasing a trend; it was about seeing where slow-moving incumbents left room for something better. As he put it, “There was a 95% chance we’d fail. But there was a 5% chance we’d create something meaningfully better — and that felt worth it.”

• Great leaders don’t have all the ideas — they create the environment for them. At Coupa, Noah built his org around a three pillars of development: divide innovation into thirds. One third of the roadmap came directly from customer feedback. They used forums and other channels to really listen to what their customers wanted. One third expanded the market — new geos, verticals, or adjacent products. And one third was for “the crazy stuff” nobody asked for. This was where some of their biggest successes came from.

  An example? That last third produced Coupa’s benchmark analytics — a feature born from an internal brainstorm that aggregated anonymized customer data to let users see how they performed against peers. “No customer was ever going to ask for that,” Noah said. “But it became one of our biggest differentiators.” As a result, Coupa could share that customers using their software had massive time savings based on real-world data.

• Know what kind of builder you are — and when to move on. Noah’s favorite period in his decade at Coupa? “Years two through five”: the messy, creative, collaborative middle. “Running a large organization is not what I enjoy,” he admitted. “You have to take inventory of what you really like, because what you enjoy is usually what you’re good at.”

  That clarity led him to step away before the IPO — not out of burnout, but self-awareness. “It was time. What Coupa needed next wasn’t what I was best suited for.” At the end of the day, he wasn’t lit up or energized by managing hundred person + organizations.

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