I Love Proc ‘n’ Roll: The First Anniversary Special

Happy 1st Birthday to Proc & Roll! 🎂🎸

Can you believe it has been a whole year?

In this special anniversary episode, hosts Conrad Smith, Natasha Gurevich, and Zach Bachir put aside the interview scripts to reminisce on the journey from Episode 1 to 35+.

What started as a random lunch in London turned into a community of “operators in the trenches,” and we wouldn’t be here without you!

What We Cover in the Anniversary Special

1. The Origin Story We share the behind-the-scenes story of how a cold email and a serendipitous lunch sparked a deep friendship and launched the podcast.

2. The AI Rewind Conrad fires up Google’s NotebookLM live on the show to analyze our entire year of transcripts. The AI revealed our biggest recurring themes—from Ethics to the constant battle of “Savings vs. Value.”

3. Best Guest Moments We look back at the game-changing conversations that defined our first year, featuring an all-star lineup:

• Dr. Elouise Epstein (The future of AI Agents)
• Mark Raffan (Negotiation strategy)
• Alyssa Harvey Dawson & Ana Erickson (The Legal-Procurement partnership)
• Ash Hall (Career transitions)
• MVK (Michael Van Keulen) (The tech landscape)
• Josh Earley (Governance)
• Arnaud de Brux (Supply chain engineering)
• David Johnson (Leadership)

Plus, we preview upcoming episodes with Ted Baumuller and Jay Sklar.

4. 2026 Teasers We also give you a sneak peek at what’s coming next, including episodes featuring CHROs discussing the reality of layoffs and a deep dive into the critical CFO relationship.

Whether you are a CPO or a new category manager, thank you for rocking with us this year. Here’s to many more! 🥂

Watch now or read the transcript below.

Transcript: Proc-N-Roll | I Love Proc ‘n’ Roll: The First Anniversary Special

Conrad Smith: Yay guys, happy birthday!

Zachary Bachir: Happy birthday. It’s Proc and Roll. One year of Proc and Roll. I think the time just flew by as far as I’m concerned .

Conrad: Can you believe it? Should we just reminisce or should we jump in with our regular intro?

Zach: Let’s just reminisce. I think everybody knows by now that you’re listening to Proc and Roll, your practical guide to procurement. Where we make procurement rock and roll.

Conrad: Rock and roll, baby. So of course, let’s introduce each other. We have Zach, our expert in all things procurement from KPMG in London. The man who knows the city, the best places to eat and drink, and every way to save money and build relationships .

Zach: And we’ve got Natasha, our pro-CPO from IBM, McKesson, Salesforce to Nike and now founder and CEO of Candor Procurement.

Natasha Gurevich: And we have Conrad… founder and CEO of Graphite Connect and eight years in business and keep rock and rolling.

Zach: And together we have over 70 years of experience in procurement.

Conrad: We’ve been at it for a year. I can’t believe it. It’s been awesome.

Zach: I gotta say Conrad, when was that lunch meeting in London where I met up with you? That was such a great conversation… And you were like, “Hey, you got to meet Natasha. We got to get this podcast started.” It’s strange to me how that one little decision to go to lunch just turned into some great relationships .

Natasha: When we initially thought about it, we were thinking about CPOs. We thought that they will become our main audience. But I’ve heard from at least five or six of my former reports… that they wait for us to drop the episode because they actually implement majority of what we talk about in their daily operations. They use our episodes as a litmus test. So our audience is procurement operators who are in the trenches day in, day out .

Conrad: I love that. And I gotta tell you, I’m a self-proclaimed introvert… but this has been a lesson for me. Get outside of your bubble, meet some people… One of my biggest failures in the first 20 years of my career was feeling intimidated by senior people. Like I just viewed Natasha as being so much more senior… But there is zero reason not to introduce yourself .

Natasha: Which is very interesting because at the time when we met, you were already a C-suite… and you complementing my English, it is my second language… But it just tells us how sometimes the facade and the exterior… we have to push beyond that .

Conrad: You know what? I gotta bust in here because I’ve got to share one of the things I did leading up to this. I went and uploaded all our episodes into Google’s NotebookLM. It highlighted the rock and roll anthem… the “Ice Ice Baby” song… Mark Raffin’s daily rejection challenge… and Natasha’s favorite “S-word” of procurement .

Conrad: It also created a mind map. If you look across all our episodes, these are the biggest topics: Savings to Value, Procurement Technology & AI, Risk and Resilience, Procurement Basics, and Ethics .

Zach: This is a book in the making basically, right?

Natasha: So guys, do we wanna go back and just acknowledge all our guests? Our first guest was Dr. Elouise Epstein. I remember her energy… she was explaining that if you’re a CPO coming to work in 2026 and you’re not firing up your 12 agents, then you’re not doing your work right .

Zach: Yeah, she got this whole view around retiring her spider diagrams… That was a really, really great episode .

Conrad: Mark Raffan was second. Another person we got to get back. The guy was freaking awesome.

Natasha: Then we had Alyssa Harvey Dawson and Ana Erickson sharing their perspective on relationships between procurement and legal .

Conrad: Ash Hall… I wanted to talk to Ash because of his experience in moving his career around. He helped us know how to navigate those career moves.

Natasha: Josh Earley brought phenomenal energy… discussing how challenging it’s going to be for enterprises to track compliance when pretty much anyone can create their own tool or agent .

Conrad: And Arnaud from BIC spoke with us about the transition from regular milk to non-GMO milk… just what an important and strategic role procurement played in making that happen .

Natasha: Let’s give a little bit of a teaser. We’re going to have a couple of CHROs and we’ll be talking about layoffs. Do they make commercial sense? And we’ll double click on CFOs because relationships between procurement and CFO is probably one of the most critical .

Conrad: And in a couple of weeks, we’re going to go through a look back at our predictions for 2025 and a look ahead to 2026.

Zach: It’s been such an awesome year… 35 episodes and I don’t think we’re slowing down.

Conrad: Alright, love you guys. Happy New Year.

Natasha: Happy Birthday guys, bye!

This transcript has been edited for clarity while maintaining all substantive content