Justin Etkin and the price of knowing

Justin Etkin had been painting the office walls white. Tropic was moving out, the space needed to go back to its owner, and the co-founder and chief operating officer had looked around and recognized the familiar shape of an unclaimed job. It had landed with him. By the time he sat down for a conversation with Michael Koenig, he had a fresh answer to the question about the stranger things an operations career can require.

There is something clarifying about a paintbrush. An executive title can make work sound abstract; a landlord tends to have more specific requirements. Etkin's account, shared in February 2025, offers a useful introduction to someone whose business concerns the distance between what companies agree to buy and what actually happens afterward.

He would become Tropic's CEO in August 2026. But the walls come first. They make the later talk of intelligence platforms and artificial intelligence a little easier to place. Somewhere beneath all those systems is a person who notices that somebody still has to finish the job.

The buyer on the wrong side of the table

Etkin's route ran through Bain & Company and then BounceX, the software business now known as Wunderkind, where he became vice president of operations. At BounceX, he built a procurement process. David Campbell, his future co-founder, worked on the sales side. Between them, they had an unusually useful view of the same transaction.

Campbell understood the seller's machinery. Etkin understood the buyer's missing equipment. While establishing purchasing, Etkin noticed the absence of a customer relationship management equivalent for the people doing the buying. Sellers could organize information and pursue opportunities with purpose. Buyers faced an awkward collection of contracts, relationships, and deadlines.

The imbalance gave them a company to build. They founded Tropic in 2019, combining Campbell's sales experience with Etkin's operations background. Their ambition was straightforward: give software buyers enough information to negotiate with some knowledge of the market around them.

It is an appealingly practical origin. A purchase can look like a single number on a spreadsheet. Living with the purchase reveals the rest: renewal dates, commitments, unused capacity, internal approvals. Etkin had worked on the side responsible for keeping those details from becoming expensive surprises.

Knives, lobsters, and a trusted accomplice

For someone who builds for buyers, Etkin has an entertaining sales credential. He has described selling $35,000 worth of Cutco knives in one summer. He has also teased a consulting assignment involving lobsters that nearly discouraged him from procurement altogether. His professional backstory has both cutlery and crustaceans. Corporate biographies rarely provide such a well-equipped kitchen.

Those details appeared in an introduction to the subjects he wanted to discuss publicly: purchasing, organizational change, metrics, and Tropic's move from services into software. They also accompanied a more personal explanation of why he had chosen Campbell as a partner.

He described trust that had become almost conversational shorthand. Each could anticipate the other's thinking and reactions. They pushed each other, supported each other through difficult days, and shared an expectation that both would care enough to keep going.

The anecdotes make the introduction funny. The partnership makes it consequential. Their argument about better information for buyers depended on a relationship that could survive the slow, ordinary work of building a business. A co-founder agreement has signatures. Working together requires considerably more.

First do the work. Then make it useful twice.

Tropic began with a service: helping customers buy software and negotiate contracts. For Etkin, those engagements had a second purpose. They generated information that would be difficult to obtain from a comfortable distance. Actual purchasing work produced knowledge about actual prices.

In his August 2024 account of the business, he organized its data strategy around collection, normalization, and distribution. The middle word carries much of the burden. A pile of agreements becomes more useful when their different terms and pricing structures can be compared. Otherwise, a large database can remain a very elaborate filing cabinet.

The sequence explains his interest in services as a starting point. Tropic could address an immediate customer problem while accumulating the material for its software. Its own history dates the move to a SaaS platform to May 2023.

Etkin's contribution sits in that passage from individual work to repeatable knowledge. What happens in one negotiation can help inform another, provided someone does the work of making the comparison meaningful. The company was building a way for a buyer's experience to travel farther than the buyer.

The discipline of leaving a fair deal alone

Etkin's advice has room for an unfashionable outcome: accepting a price that is already reasonable. In a renewal example, he describes checking the agreement against the market before deciding how hard to negotiate. If the deal is fair, it can move through. A procurement team has other things to do.

He applies a similar sense of proportion to internal process. Companies can introduce so many rules that colleagues stop believing in the system. They can also introduce rules that leaders never enforce. His preferred approach depends on what the business is trying to accomplish and what employees will actually adopt.

That makes his operating philosophy less theatrical than a permanent campaign for discounts. Good judgment includes knowing where attention will pay off. The argument is particularly useful for someone who has personally discovered that an office move contains a painting assignment.

In his model, procurement needs visibility, controls, and impact. Knowing what is happening gives the rules a purpose; the rules make sustained results possible. Savings remain part of the job, but a process that consumes everyone's patience has its own cost.

When the operator stopped answering everything

At the end of 2025, Etkin described a less tidy period at Tropic. The company had spread itself too thin. It was chasing the market, its proposition was failing to connect, and its product was being asked to cover too much ground.

The response included turning away interested buyers. Tropic narrowed the customers it was trying to serve and concentrated on the work it believed it could deliver well. For a growing business, declining interest is an uncomfortable form of discipline. An opportunity can be flattering and still consume the attention needed somewhere else.

Etkin also changed his own job. He described learning to reinforce a consistent strategy and allow other leaders to make decisions within their functions. His shorthand was wonderfully economical: “Let them cook.”

There is a connection here to his purchasing advice. A fair deal can be allowed through. A capable colleague can be allowed to decide. In both cases, the operator has to resist turning personal involvement into the measure of good work. For someone accustomed to catching the unclaimed jobs, that is a meaningful adjustment.

“Let them cook.”

Justin Etkin, reflecting on leadership in 2025

A new title, and a more variable bill

Tropic announced Etkin's appointment as CEO on August 13, 2026. Campbell remained chairman and an adviser, with a focus on go-to-market strategy and corporate initiatives. The change formalized a transition that had been developing over the previous year.

The new title arrived as the buying problem grew more complicated. AI could change both what a software product offered and how the customer was charged. Etkin had warned earlier in 2026 about vendors bundling AI into products without giving customers an effective choice to decline it. A buyer might face a changed package close to renewal, with little time to consider alternatives.

That is a particularly awkward version of the information problem that interested him in the first place. Evaluating a product means asking what it does, what the company needs, and what the bill represents. If those move together at different speeds, an attractive headline price reveals only part of the commitment.

On August 19, Tropic introduced AI Consumption Management, software redundancy analysis, and planning tools. The emphasis extended to comparing consumption with commitments and identifying overlapping capabilities. Etkin's old concern about visibility had acquired a new unit of measurement.

Who learns the job when the job changes?

For all his interest in automation, Etkin has also raised a question about the people coming after him. He credits Bain with teaching him to structure problems, think under pressure, and get things done inside complex organizations. He worries about where newcomers will acquire those abilities if the entry-level work that once taught them keeps shrinking.

It is a revealing concern for a founder selling efficiency. Reviewing agreements and building models can be tedious; they can also be how a person learns enough to exercise judgment later. Removing the task leaves a question about the apprenticeship.

He has expressed a related belief about purchasing itself: relationships and intuition still matter in strategic technology decisions, even as software takes on more surrounding work. “You can't agentify intuition,” he wrote after a dinner with procurement leaders in Seattle.

By October 2026, Tropic was reporting another quarter of growth and extending its intelligence through partners including Zip, Omnea, and Vantage Decisions. The distribution methods were changing. Etkin's underlying preoccupation was recognizable: put useful knowledge where someone can act on it. Better equipment for the buyer, and enough room for a person to know what to do with it.