David Campbell

David Campbell is co-founder and chief executive of Tropic, a New York, New York, software procurement and spend platform used by startups and large enterprises to buy software, manage contracts and monitor usage. He likes to call himself an "alt CEO," with a background in English literature rather than a standard tech resume.

Growing Up on a Ranch in the Mojave Desert

He grew up on a ranch in the Mojave Desert in California and started side businesses young, from a rock museum that charged entry fees to burning and selling CDs, according to Contrary Research. He studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and after college moved into a cabin in Northern California with no phone or internet for a year and a half to write a novel he never published.

Choosing Sales Over the Cabin

That stretch convinced him entrepreneurship was the creative work he wanted. He told Contrary Research that company building left more room for creative output than writing a book. He entered tech through sales roles, including time at Microsoft's Financial Services group, and rose to vice president of strategic accounts at Wunderkind, formerly BounceX, where he helped scale revenue from about $100,000 to roughly $100 million.

Watching Nike Sign a Tenfold Quote

At Wunderkind he saw how opaque software pricing could be. He recalled pitching Nike on a $100,000 contract when a CRO suggested quoting $1 million instead; Nike signed, and the team had 10x'd the deal with no change in the product. At Microsoft he also saw large buyers such as AIG approach renewals unsure what they already owned. Across startups, mid-market firms and enterprises, he concluded almost everyone bought software poorly.

Founding Tropic with Justin Etkin

In 2019 he founded Tropic with Justin Etkin, a former Wunderkind operations leader who had built an internal procurement tool for Campbell's sales team because nothing on the market fit. Tropic began as procurement-as-a-service and widened into a spend platform. Campbell is based in New York, New York, and still frames the company as fixing a process that slows every team that runs on software, as he wrote for Procurement Magazine.