Founding Tools: Antonio and Jake (Procuro AI)

Interviews with early stage founders about the tech stacks that power their business.

Meet CEO Antonio Goncalves and CTO Jake Vollkommer, founders of Procuro AI, a platform that automates B2B procurement contracts with AI.

They started the company in 2023 and both work out of their respective hometowns, Miami and New York. The two met in college and have been best friends ever since!

We talked about their entire team tech stack, from payroll to their web dev framework of choice.

This is an honest account of the software they chose, why they picked it, and how they feel about it now (including early mistakes and what they would’ve done differently).

💼 CEO STACK – Antonio, the procurement pro

Can't Live Without

• Deal Room: Flowla - Provides a white-glove customer onboarding experience, making the team seem buttoned-up with their clients. Great for sales presentations, file organization, and action tracking.

• Task Management: Akiflow - Antonio's go-to task management tool, integrating with calendar, Github, and Notion.

• Airline: Frontier - $68 flights between Miami and Florida. That’s it.

Wouldn't Recommend

• Outbound: Apollo - While good for lead generation, they experienced significant domain deliverability issues when using it for outbound emails.

• Incorporation: Stripe Atlas - Zero post-incorporation support (heaven forbid you want to change your company name).

• Workspace: Microsoft365 - Don’t be drawn in by their startup discounts. They constantly dealt with system crashing, confusing UI, and weird authentication that constantly signed them out before finally migrating off.

Honorable Mentions

• Intros: Cabal - Free platform to make the most of your advisors’ networks (including your investors, board, mentors).

• Accounting: Xero - Dead simple, rules-based accounting, for a team that didn’t know what “bookkeeping” was.

What They Wish They Knew

• Leverage startup discounts: Many companies offer them, but you have to ask. Sometimes your investor/accelerator hands you discounts, but you often need to go directly to the provider. Antonio even reached out to Flowla's founder directly to ask for credits.

• Hire experts for migrations: When moving from Microsoft365 to Google Workspace, they tried to do it themselves and wound up losing their emails for a day. Turns out there are plenty of (cheap) experts on Upwork who could’ve saved them a headache.

• Manage domain deliverability: Warm up your domains so your outbound emails actually reach people’s inboxes (instead of their spam). It’s worth learning how to use Instantly to do this yourself, and using something like LemList to actually send the emails.

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

• CRM: They wish they had a modern CRM that looks like it was made this decade, but has Hubspot-level integrations with all the other platforms they use.

• Payroll & HR: They’re on the lookout for a platform that takes more of the work off their plates and can handle edge cases without requiring them to hunt down state-specific requirements and send out physical mail.

🤖 CTO STACK – Jake, the hardcore backend engineer

Can't Live Without

• Web Dev: Next.js + shadcdn + sst - Perfect combination for building a serverless, fully-fledged product with robust type safety. The monorepo architecture allows for a single source of truth, making development faster. Use shadcn/ui for your component library, it’s easy to integrate and way smoother than anything you’ll build yourself. sst is the best option for deploying Next.js outside of Vercel.

• Coding Copilot: Codeium - Train on code their team has written, not the public corpus of available coding data.

• IDE: neovim - And he won’t let you forget it.

Wouldn't Recommend

• Security: Auth0 - Jake regrets choosing it as he was locked out of an admin account for a month due to a passkey setup issue. He's heard better things about Clerk.

• LLM: OpenAI - While it’s fine to get you started, once you’re analyzing cost and performance, it’s time to consider moving to open source (Mistral, Llama 3, and Gemini are all great options).

• IDE: VSCode - 🤮

Honorable Mentions

• Password Management: 1Password - Recommended for its seamless functionality, startup discount, and developer-friendly features.

• Productivity: Raycast - “It’s what spotlight search on Mac should be."

• Browser: Arc - Life-changing compared to Chrome, helps you control tab overload and lets you split your screen.

What They Wish They Knew

• Start with design: No matter how technical you are, build your first prototype in Figma, then move to no-code tools before coding. It saves time and improves frontend quality.

• Use what you know: When starting, stick with technologies you're comfortable with rather than learning new ones (e.g. if you know React, go with that).

• Customize your AI: On the other hand, don’t rely too much on AI frameworks to abstract away concepts. Langchain and Llamaindex are good for prototyping, but you should understand what’s under the hood and optimize your AI system to your business needs over time.

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

• Payments: Stripe had a (surprisingly) terrible developer implementation experience. They need a reliable invoicing system as they start onboarding their first paid customers.

• Project Management: As a small team, Github Issues works well for them, but as they grow, they’re open to trying something new. 

Thank you Antonio and Jake for being the guinea pigs for Founding Tools. Check out Procuro for your procurement contract automation needs. Special shoutout to my amazing friends who edited, inspired, and helped make this idea legible: Jake Zegil, Derek Larson, and Jess Del Virginia.

Design by the one and only Courtney Ling.