Amaan Nathoo had decided to close his startup. Over coffee, he told Aman Mann, who was trying to build Procurify and raise its seed round. Mann offered him a job. The available pay was $1,000 a month until the financing arrived. Nathoo accepted. Only later did he learn that Procurify had been unable to afford even that amount. Mann had asked for it to come out of his own salary.
Nathoo told the story years afterward, remembering how quickly the offer changed his sense of what he could contribute. He went on to spend two years at Procurify. The detail that sticks is the accounting: a founder making room for another person by reducing his own share. For someone selling software to help companies decide how to spend money, it was a revealing purchase.
Mann’s career contains bigger numbers, prominent investors and the usual succession of funding rounds. Yet that small monthly payment offers a useful way into it. Again and again, his decisions bring the conversation back to people: who gets trusted, who gets a chance, and who bears the cost when a business changes course.
Before software, a factory floor
Mann was born and raised in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Before building a technology company, he worked in sales for a Chinese manufacturer and later in operations at Ocean Spray. At the manufacturer, he grew a goatee to appear older at trade shows. Business credibility, at that stage, involved a modest investment in facial hair.
At Ocean Spray, he worked his way into plant management and asked his general manager, “how do I take over your job?” The advice was to add education to his practical experience. He enrolled in Operations Management at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
There he met Kenneth Loi and Eugene Dong through a practicum involving manufacturing companies. Their work exposed awkward spending processes that held up operations. Here was a problem with consequences beyond untidy paperwork. The three began developing an answer. Mann’s route to software ran through the places where requests, production schedules and money had to meet.
A customer before a company mythology
An early aerospace customer gave the idea something more useful than applause. After a BCIT showcase presentation, the team secured its first contract. Someone had a sufficiently irritating problem to pay for a solution. That is a fairly stern examination for a student project.
The founders described a gap between expensive enterprise systems and the needs of smaller businesses. They wanted purchasing software that people could learn and use without the burden associated with larger installations. A business dollar could be requested, approved and tracked through an interface intended for the people doing the work.
The project took shape before Procurify’s official 2013 founding date. That distinction matters less than the sequence: the founders encountered an operational problem, tested a response and found a buyer. The business did not begin with a grand theory about which technology ought to be fashionable. It began with a customer who wanted the purchasing process to work.
BCIT classmates begin working on the idea.
Procurify’s official founding year.
A US$50 million Series C.
Mann moves to Chief Strategy Officer.
The email at the back of a book
Getting money to build it required a different education. Mann and his co-founders put Mark Cuban on a list of people whose advice they wanted. They found his email address in his book and wrote to him. Cuban replied, initially declined an advisory role, then eventually invested after further exchanges and the team’s entry into an accelerator.
It is an excellent anecdote for anyone selling the merits of sending one more email. Mann’s telling also supplies the less convenient sequel: later fundraising involved repeated rejection. A famous early backer did not make the rest automatic.
During a trip to Palo Alto, he asked a new contact for customer introductions and received an offer to invest instead. His account of those encounters is full of surprise at how the industry worked. He was learning the rules while trying to keep revenue coming in. There was no polished instruction manual tucked underneath the pitch deck.
“Simplicity, Patience, Compassion.”
Aman Mann’s stated personal virtues
Vancouver was part of the ambition
There was another rule Mann did not readily accept: that a promising Canadian software business should move south. Procurify’s Series A investor, Runa Capital, described investor pressure to relocate the headquarters to Silicon Valley. Runa welcomed the chance to back the company in Vancouver.
The distinction was personal as well as geographic. In an early interview, Mann described wanting to inspire local entrepreneurs. The successful company he imagined would also make it easier for other people nearby to imagine starting one. A business could sell internationally while remaining part of the city that produced it.
Vancouver offered more than a scenic address. BCIT had brought the founders together. The region’s companies had supplied problems to investigate and an early customer. Staying meant continuing to build in that network. It gave his ambition a particular location, with classmates and future founders attached, rather than an interchangeable pin on a map.
The costume was quite deliberate. Procurify’s mascot, Dash, was a sloth: a joke about the slow processes the company wanted to improve. For a 2019 photo session, Mann searched out the suit and wore it on the roof. Procurement may struggle as dinner-party conversation, but it had acquired an unusually committed wardrobe department.
The ordinary purchase, reconsidered
Underneath the theatre was a practical product argument. Mann described companies whose purchasing information arrived at finance through scattered, improvised processes. Growth made those arrangements harder to manage. A surprise expense or an unhelpful purchasing decision could expose the weakness after the commitment had already been made.
Procurify put requests and approvals into a shared system, giving finance a view of decisions as they happened. That placed the useful moment earlier in the transaction. Teams could make requests through a defined process while the organization could see what it was agreeing to fund.
In Mann’s view, smaller and midsized organizations needed simplicity because they could not absorb the complexity available to large enterprises. Software had to fit their actual use. An elegant feature that nobody wanted to open would be a rather elaborate way of preserving the old problem.
A shared process brings finance into the decision while there is still a decision to make.
He also used the phrase spend culture. In his conversations about procurement, the choices surrounding money were connected to trust and individual responsibility. A system could help people make better choices together. It could also remove some of the friction that made colleagues suspicious of one another’s requests.
When four days stayed four days
The same questions appeared inside Procurify. The leadership team introduced a 20 percent salary reduction during a period of uncertainty to avoid layoffs. Mann paired it with reduced working hours. If people were being asked to give something up, the company would adjust what it expected from them.
Within months, salaries returned to their previous level. The four-day working week remained. By the time Mann discussed the arrangement on CNBC in January 2024, the company said it had been operating that way for more than three years.
That sequence gives the policy its interest. A temporary financial measure produced a lasting change in the working week. Restoring pay did not automatically restore the fifth day. Procurify said it had seen gains in productivity, efficiency and team satisfaction. Those were the company’s observations, rather than a promise that every workplace could reproduce the result.
It was nevertheless a concrete expression of a familiar concern in Mann’s career: what should happen to the people doing the work when a business faces a difficult decision?
A larger cheque, the same spending question
In October 2023, Procurify announced a US$50 million Series C led by Ten Coves Capital, with participation from Export Development Canada and existing investors. The company reported managing more than US$30 billion in customer spending. These were different measures: capital raised to build Procurify, and spending managed through its platform.
For Mann, the commercial argument remained tied to visibility over money leaving a business. Revenue attracts attention; purchasing decisions determine how much of it remains available for the next priority. Procurify planned to use the investment for international expansion, payment capabilities and AI development.
In October 2024, it launched a new accounts payable automation solution. The work extended the product across purchasing, invoices and payments. The company had travelled a long way from its first contract, while staying close to the operational territory where Mann had begun.
Giving up the chair, keeping the work
On January 7, 2025, Procurify named Chad Gaydos CEO. Mann became Chief Strategy Officer. The handover separated two roles often treated as inseparable in founder stories: creating a company and remaining its chief executive.
In his farewell as CEO, Mann remembered the small room above a mattress shop where Procurify had started. He thanked the team and customers, framing the business around solving practical problems and treating people well. The new role kept him involved in its direction while Gaydos took responsibility for the next phase of leadership.
There is a pleasing continuity between that handover and the earlier coffee with Nathoo. Both concern making room for someone else. One involved an offer a young company could barely afford; the other involved the position Mann had held for more than a decade. Between them sits a business built around the proposition that decisions about money are also decisions about people. The ledger always contains both.