David Campbell and the art of switching sides

The first fundraising trip came with twin beds. David Campbell and Justin Etkin were flying between New York and San Francisco, trying to persuade investors that buying software deserved its own software. They were paying about $100 a night for Airbnb rooms. The beds, Campbell recalled, were roughly five feet apart. Even a promising business partnership benefits from a little personal space.

That was the accommodation budget behind Tropic’s early pitch. The raise took three and a half weeks. In April 2020, the company emerged with a $2.1 million seed round led by Founder Collective. Campbell had never raised capital before. He and Etkin had, however, worked together, disagreed together and learned what the other person could do. Their business began with an unusually useful qualification: one understood selling software; the other understood buying it.

Six years later, their division of labor would produce another decision. On August 13, 2026, Etkin became CEO. Campbell, who had led Tropic since its founding, remained chairman. A company built to question a vendor’s proposal was now questioning its own leadership arrangement. Campbell’s answer was to change seats.

A novelist with a ticket booth

Before there were enterprise contracts, there were rocks. Campbell grew up on a ranch in the Mojave Desert and, at seven, created a rock museum and charged admission. At twelve, during the Napster years, he was burning and selling CDs. The business models were modest. The willingness to find a customer was already there.

He imagined a creative life, perhaps as a novelist or musician. After college, he spent a year and a half in a Northern California cabin, without a phone or internet, trying to write a novel. It is a fairly thorough way to avoid notifications. What attracted him, he later explained, was the freedom to choose his hours, set a vision and work out how to execute it.

The manuscript did not become his career. His 400-page novel remained unpublished. His degree was in English literature, and his Berkeley education ran from 2005 to 2009. Dante, Homer and Chaucer appeared among his listed academic activities. Procurement would eventually supply its own catalogue of ordeals, though usually with less satisfactory verse.

The creative ambition survived the change of occupation. Campbell has described company building as a creative pursuit with many kinds of output. That idea helps explain the route that followed. Writing a business into existence offered him collaborators, customers and feedback that a solitary manuscript could not. The audience could also refuse to renew, a form of criticism unusually difficult to ignore.

The seller starts reading the other side’s paperwork

At BounceX, now Wunderkind, Campbell was one of the first twenty employees and rose to vice president. He met Etkin, who worked in operations. Campbell described their time there as an education in growing a business from twenty people to 350 and roughly $80 million in revenue. These were company milestones, and he was learning inside them.

Microsoft came next. As a global business manager, he sold into very large financial institutions. The scale changed; the frustration on the purchasing side remained. Buyers had difficulty understanding and managing what they were purchasing. Campbell had seen software transactions from the small-company end and the enterprise end. The recurring complaint began to look like a business opportunity.

One enterprise renewal stayed with him. In his account, a customer faced a software commitment it could not comfortably afford while reducing staff. The experience helped push him toward building for the buyer. The telling matters: this was a salesman recognizing that a completed transaction could look very different from the opposite chair.

Tropic’s founding proposition followed that reversal. Sales organizations had systems, information and practiced processes. Buyers needed comparable support. Etkin brought experience establishing purchasing processes; Campbell brought knowledge of how a deal was sold. Their partnership gave the problem two witnesses who had previously stood on different sides of the table.

Paradise, with renewal reminders

The name was part of the argument. Campbell wanted to avoid the familiar enterprise naming conventions, including the fashionable “ly” and “ify” endings. Tropic’s branding was intended to feel more approachable to the people making buying decisions. A procurement product could have a personality. Its customers were people, even when their signatures committed a company’s budget.

The beach-adjacent vocabulary could sound improbable beside a software renewal. That was the joke, and also the aspiration: make a frustrating job less unpleasant. A purchasing experience ought to help someone understand a decision, compare options and move forward. It should not require a second career in interpreting a supplier’s packaging.

Campbell’s objection also extended to incentives. In a later interview, he described a commission-free marketplace as a way to align Tropic with buyers. That concern is practical. When advice influences a purchase, the customer has reason to ask who pays for the advice and what behavior that payment rewards.

His examples could be wonderfully ordinary. In 2022, he described encountering separate Slack contracts in separate teams at the same company. The waste was hiding in organizational seams. An additional negotiation might help, but first somebody had to notice what the business already owned. Here was a problem suited to an observant reader: the important information existed, scattered across documents nobody had assembled into a coherent account.

The difficult middle of a useful idea

The funding followed quickly: $25 million in August 2021 and $40 million in February 2022. Those rounds gave Campbell and Etkin resources to build. They also left the central task intact. Customers needed a product that could turn repeated purchasing experience into something they could use themselves.

In a January 2023 reflection on the previous year, Campbell wrote that most advice had favored caution. He and Etkin had instead continued investing, betting that companies under pressure to reduce costs would need Tropic. It was a commercially coherent wager. Its execution still required decisions about people, product and how much work the company should do on a customer’s behalf.

Tropic dates its shift to a true SaaS platform to May 2023. Later that year, Campbell publicly announced that 26 employees were being let go in a restructuring for its 2024 strategy. He explained that a software business operated differently from a technology-enabled services business. The consequences fell on people who had helped build the earlier version.

He thanked the departing employees, offered to connect them with employers and acknowledged how hard it could be to recognize the required changes inside one’s own business. The announcement complicates the bright founding story. A company promising efficiency to customers had to confront what efficiency meant within its own organization.

“We haven't always succeeded. We will never stop trying.”

David Campbell, on building Tropic’s workplace

His later account of Tropic’s values made room for that gap between intention and outcome. Employees, he said, supplied the input for revised values rather than receiving a list imposed by leadership. One instruction was to pull back the curtain. Publishing difficult decisions gave that phrase consequences beyond office decoration.

What the title was asking of him

By 2024, Campbell was discussing product adoption, retention, pricing and packaging on The SaaS CFO podcast. The subjects reflected a business that had moved beyond finding its first customers. Building something useful was followed by making it understandable, repeatable and economical to deliver. Each stage presented its own work.

That progression eventually reached the CEO’s desk. In announcing the leadership change, Campbell described his particular enthusiasm for starting companies and taking them from zero to one. He distinguished that period’s improvisation and rule breaking from the systems and operational discipline required at greater scale. His conclusion was personal: Etkin was suited to lead the next stage.

There is a familiar founder story in which persistence means holding the same position indefinitely. Campbell’s decision suggests another possibility. Knowing a business closely can include recognizing when somebody else’s strengths fit its present needs. The co-founder who had long supplied an operational counterweight would now have the chief executive title.

The August announcement described a planned succession already developing over the preceding year. Campbell would continue advising on go-to-market strategy and broader corporate initiatives. He was remaining involved in a company whose earliest version he remembered as a spreadsheet prototype. The job description had changed alongside the product.

The next draft belongs to more people

By October 2026, Tropic was reporting $25 billion in spend under management and $450 million in customer savings. These are company-reported operating figures, rather than revenue or Campbell’s personal wealth. The business was also extending its intelligence through partners and AI assistants, and introducing tools for AI consumption and software overlap. Buying technology had acquired fresh complications.

That makes the chairman role an interesting continuation of his earlier work. The problem he chose remains recognizable: someone needs to understand an expensive proposal before signing it. The delivery has changed from services and a prototype toward data, software and AI. Etkin now runs the company; Campbell stays close to its commercial direction.

The unpublished novelist has spent years working on something that other people keep revising. Customers changed it. Employees built it. A co-founder brought a different set of instincts and eventually took the CEO job. For someone who once sought complete control over his working day in a cabin, that is a substantial development in the plot.

And there is a pleasing continuity. The seven-year-old charging admission had found an audience. The salesman learned to pay attention to the buyer. The chairman has made room for his partner to lead. Campbell’s story keeps turning on the same useful question: who is on the other side of this arrangement, and what do they need?