Meet Vendr's new CTO: Kerry Munz, former VP of Engineering at HubSpot

We’ve had an eventful year at Vendr, closing our $60M Series A in March, growing our team by over 250%, and helping our customers save over $90M+.

And today, we welcome Kerry Munz, former VP of Engineering at HubSpot, as Vendr’s new CTO.

Engineer by trade; negotiator by heart

Over the last five years at HubSpot, Kerry ran the Platform Infrastructure Group, growing the platform to support hundreds of thousands of users and millions of transactions per second.

She led the transformation of HubSpot's Revenue Product Organization to scale HubSpot's revenues over $1B ARR and spoke at industry conferences like Google Cloud Next and Grace Hopper (the leading conference for women in technology).

Working closely with Darius Contractor, Chief Product and Engineering Officer, the two plan to take our data and engineering efforts to the next level, productizing away the pain of SaaS buying as it exists today.

“Kerry is the consummate engineering executive, having spent years working as a Principal Engineer, mastering the craft, and then excelling in management at top companies. She runs organizations that win and is a magnet for talent. Her deep understanding of procurement from an engineering perspective will be a massive unlock for the company strategically.” - Darius Contractor

With extensive experience in startups, scale-ups, and enterprise-level companies, Kerry's insight into how fast-growing tech companies approach SaaS buying is second to none. In addition to scaling teams, Kerry proactively took on negotiations for $80M+ worth of technology contracts, saving her team hundreds of hours and millions of dollars. In fact, that’s how I met Kerry in 2018. 

The origin story

Around the same time I started Vendr, HubSpot was hiring their first procurement person. Given Vendr’s mission to help every company buy the right SaaS at the best price, this seemed to be a perfect fit for customer #2.

Turns out, unlike most orgs, this role was to sit on Engineering instead of Finance. HubSpot's Engineering team used a lot of SaaS (like most do) and decided to hire a dedicated procurement person to give engineers and engineering leaders time back in the day. After a few attempts, I booked a meeting with the team’s leader — Kerry Munz.

"I want you to know that I'm not going to become a customer,“ is how Kerry started the meeting. “We want procurement to be full-time and in-house. We don't plan to outsource this to Vendr.”

Instead of trying to sell her, I used our time for advice and asked her about the pain she experienced with vendor management. Back then, she spent 25% of her time on SaaS buying, which took her away from her team. 

Our conversation gained momentum and Kerry proposed a real-time negotiation roleplay. Kerry acted as the supplier and I was the buyer. As a salesperson, role-playing is the normal course of business for training and interviewing – never had I role-played with a prospect. 

Kerry and I finished the meeting by bonding over our favorite negotiation book, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, and ended with the possibility of Kerry giving Vendr a shot. A couple of weeks later, she became our second customer.

Building the future of SaaS buying

Fast-forward a few years and Kerry is now a part of the Vendr team. As an engineering leader and long-time Vendr customer, Kerry’s built deep insight and empathy into how high-growth tech companies approach SaaS buying. 

“As the CTO, I’m focused on technology and teams. Most importantly, as a former customer, I’ll bring the voice of our customers to all of our decisions. 

Ownership, trust, and transparency are important values to me and Vendr already has a culture of celebrating strong values, so I’m excited to be an amplifier and build an amazing experience for our customers.

SaaS is so critical now to scaling companies through automation. But finding the right tool, getting the right price, and managing hundreds of contracts comes with a large burden to manage the risk – and yet an opportunity for incredible leverage.”

2022 and beyond

2021 has been a whirlwind of excitement at Vendr and with the addition of Kerry as our CTO, we are primed to fix SaaS sales and build the way companies buy SaaS forever. In her own words:

“Sales is broken. Vendr is growing extremely fast, bringing transparency to Sales and trust to all of us leaders who depend on SaaS to serve our customers and scale our companies. HubSpot’s Brian Halligan taught me how you sell is how you win. 

Vendr flips that equation to how you buy is how you win. How you find, buy, and manage SaaS with Vendr is how you scale, how you save, and how you kick SaaS. 

I’m excited to truly transform SaaS sales into a marketplace of transparency and trust.”

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