Tina Kung Talks CPQ Innovation with Frank Sohn on the CPQ Podcast
Tina Kung Talks CPQ Innovation with Frank Sohn on the CPQ Podcast
The Nue Team
Description
Tina Kung, co-founder and CTO of Nue, joined host Frank Sohn on the CPQ Podcast to talk about her journey through four generations of CPQ and billing systems, and why those experiences ultimately inspired her to start Nue.
Drawing on leadership roles at Oracle, Salesforce, and Zuora, Tina shares what she’s learned about where legacy systems succeed, where they break down, and why modern revenue operations require a more unified approach.
In their discussion, Frank and Tina explore the cracks between CPQ and billing that companies struggle with, from endless workarounds to the complexity of supporting PLG and enterprise sales in parallel. Their discussion sheds light on the practical challenges companies face and what it takes to solve them.
Transcription
Frakn Sohn: Welcome to the Configure Price Quote podcast. My name is Frank Sohn, and I'm the founder of Novus CPQ Consulting. This podcast is a hundred percent focused on configure-price-quote, also known as CPQ, and will provide you useful insights into this topic.
I am thrilled to welcome Tina Kung to the CPQ podcast today. Tina is a co-founder and CTO of Nue.io and has over 20 years of business experience in the software industry with firms like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Zuora, Neo CRM, and others. She held various leadership positions and co-founded Nue IO in 2021, and I'm super excited to have her today.
Welcome to the CPQ Podcast, Tina.
Tina: Thank you so much for having me. I'm just, I'm really excited to be here. It's always fun for me to talk about CPQ billing and everything behind the scene and what goes into making revenue operations actually run smoothly. I've been lucky to see a lot over the years and looking forward to sharing a lot of that journey and what we're up to at Nue.
Frank: Now I'm super excited, as I said, and let's start maybe by telling me a little bit more about what you did before you founded Nue. I already mentioned the who’s who of the tech world, right? But say it in your own words so that people understand where you come from.
Tina: Yep. So before co-founding Nue, I spent about two decades leading engineering teams focused on building enterprise platforms and applications.
That goes from the very early days of on-premise to modern SaaS. So I had the opportunity to work at companies like Ariba, Oracle, Niku, which was acquired by CA, Salesforce, Zuora, Neo CRM serving global companies such as Coca-Cola, Walmart, New York Times, HBO, and so on. No, and the question I have to ask you automatically is, so you worked for all these big companies, had a big career, were leaders, so that's all safety, financial security and everything.
Frank: What drove you to really then start Nue? Why didn't you stick with these big companies and fill that job?
Tina: Over the years you've seen I've had a chance to build four different generations of CPQ and billing systems, right? Including the CPQs that support complex, big machine, physical goods at Oracle and later Salesforce.
Then moving into like modern subscription for CPQ and billing at Zuora, and eventually leading the development of a mobile for CPQ platform, a Neo CRM in Asia. So that journey really gave me like some deep understanding of how these systems succeed and also where they break which essentially inspire me to start Nue.