It’s All About Community Thoughts from Coupa Inspire
A few weeks ago, Coupa hosted the largest gathering in its history.
Over 2,100 members of the Business Spend Management (BSM) Community joined us to hear from more than 100 speakers across 50 sessions. This included keynotes by Coupa executives as well as esteemed thought leaders Malcom Gladwell, Suze Orman, and Deepak Chopra.
Theme of “community” was on display from the start. Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn kicked off the conference with a story about his own personal quest to find a community to belong to, leading him to join online groups of pizza lovers and cat fanatics before finally finding his tribe amongst those who care about business impact and real value: the Business Spend Management community. 
Rob shared several compelling stories of BSM community leaders from MGM Resorts International, lululemon athletica, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Then, global thought leader Malcolm Gladwell – named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine – gave an insightful presentation about why winning teams are only as strong as their weakest links, and to strengthen a community means making sure we lift up our everyday players, not just our superstars. We closed Day One with keynotes from our partners Accenture and KPMG.
Coupa CMO Chandar Pattabhiram started Day Two by taking us back to 1911 and showing us how, throughout history, it’s stories that have bound communities. He then shared the stories of many of our community members including Highmark Health, P&G, and USO before asking all of us to find our inner Spielbergs and bring our own stories to life. 
Coupa SVP of Products Raja Hammoud and SVP of Business Acceleration Ravi Thakur unveiled our latest innovations that were co-created with the community, including Coupa Pay Invoice Payments, Coupa Voice, Procurable Expense Spotlight, and Source Together. In addition, Ravi announced new partnerships with Citi, PayPal, Stripe, and TransferMate.
We closed our Day Two morning with talks that inspired us to be our best in our financial and spiritual lives from Suze Orman and Deepak Chopra. Both took us out of our comfort zones by asking us to question our everyday choices that impact our wellbeing.
Throughout the event, we enjoyed breakout sessions including talks with Amazon, Barclays, BlackRock, Google, Mastercard, and many more. And we launched the BSM Spendsetters, a collection of inspiring leaders with powerful stories about disrupting the status quo, which debuted at www.spendsetters.com.
We closed the event in true community fashion with an epic dance party, which featured the talented band Live 61 – along with Journey’s former lead singer, Steve Augeri, before leading up to 90s hip hop masters Sir Mix-A-Lot, Tone Loc, and, finally, Vanilla Ice.
It was truly inspiring to share the week with our amazing BSM community, and we thank those of you who were able to join us. And for those of you who couldn’t join, check out a few of these related resources:
Spend Matters Write Up on Coupa Inspire '19
Diginomica Coverage of Coupa Inspire '19
WWW.COUPAINSPIRE.COM (Inspire’19 EMEA registration is now open for London, 5-7 November!)
And see more great pictures from Inspire '19 right here!
Kim Bonnar White is the Senior Director of Global Events at Coupa and cut her teeth at industry titans like PeopleSoft, salesforce.com, Workday and VMware to name a few. After three years of writing technical training guides, she developed a passion for marketing through education, moved to strategic global events and has never looked back. Her personal mission is to genuinely inspire every community member who attends a Coupa conference.
