# Unfiltered: The Long Game At BILL > Source: > Published: 2026-08-23 10:00:00+00:00 [Open Source CEO by Bill Kerr](../)- Posts - Unfiltered: The Long Game At BILL # Unfiltered: The Long Game At BILL ## How BILL quietly became the back office for 8 million businesses. 💾 👋 Howdy to the 3,855 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 538,089-strong tribe outperforming the competition together. **LATEST POSTS** 📚 If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions. 🎈 [The Unexpected AI Hero (Newsletters)](https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/newsletters-guest-post). How to convince AI you are the best product on the market. ✹ [My Public Speaking Journey](https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/public-speaking). How to wield words like a champion and convince people of your plight. 🎹 [Inside Canva's Conversational & Agentic AI Era](https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/danny-wu-interview). An interview with Danny Wu, Head of AI Products at Canva. **PARTNERS **đŸ’« [ZeroClick](https://www.zeroclick.ai?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=OSN) lets you sell your product to AI agents. One in two visitors to your site is already an agent, but most businesses have no way to sell to them. ZeroClick changes that by turning any API or offering into [an agent-purchasable service](https://www.zeroclick.ai?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=OSN) with x402 & MPP support, a machine-readable storefront, agent transaction analytics, and robust pricing controls. Framer helps teams [design, build, and launch their marketing sites](https://framer.link/c51s5zw?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) lightning fast. 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My #1is definitely [Luke from the Outdoor Boys YouTube Channel](https://youtu.be/zHt1IEgEISo?si=C_rQzbwxz7pWdHHj&utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) (if you know, you know). Something about watching this guy go out into the wilderness, cook food, and look for ptarmigan can soothe even the harshest soul. Other bangers I enjoy are [Beard Meets Food](https://www.youtube.com/@Beardmeatsfood?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), [Andy Cooks](https://www.youtube.com/@andy_cooks?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), [The Rewatchables](https://www.youtube.com/@RingerMovies?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), [Restore Machines](https://www.youtube.com/@restoremachines?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), and [Wheelie Yellow](https://www.youtube.com/@WheelieYellow?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). Reply to this email and tell me a few of yours. I’m always looking for new recommendations. Enjoy today’s piece! **ZERO TO ONE** đŸŒ± # RenĂ© Lacerte, Founder & CEO at BILL [RenĂ© Lacerte](http://linkedin.com/in/renelacerte?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) is the Founder & CEO of [BILL](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms), a cloud-based financial automation platform that automates the parts of running a company nobody enjoys: paying bills, collecting invoices, and keeping track of where the cash actually is. He’s a fourth-generation entrepreneur from a family that has been in financial services for SMBs since the 60s. In 1999, he co-founded PayCycle, America's first online payroll service, which Intuit acquired in 2009. He founded BILL in April 2006, took it public on the NYSE in December 2019, and grew it to $1.29B in revenue in fiscal 2024, with a network of more than 8 million businesses and suppliers and close to 10,000 accounting firms using it as their core financial operations tool. [RenĂ©](http://linkedin.com/in/renelacerte?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). He bet early on accountants nobody else was courting, and treated moving money like he was already handling 1% of GDP on day one. RenĂ© reckons BILL has captured maybe 4-5% of its market so far. After two decades, he talks about it like he's just getting warmed up. BILL is now 20 years old and has moved trillions of dollars for the SMBs that built their communities around it. # Why did you think you were well-suited to build BILL? Any software company would say it must have three areas of expertise: domain, technology, and customer trust. On the domain expertise front, I had been building financial solutions for SMBs and consumers for some time, and I had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs. All of the businesses my parents and grandparents had run since the 60s had been in financial services for SMBs and accountants. Those things are part of my core. When it came to technology, I had been building software for some time too. I built software that addressed some of these pain points at my parents' payroll company and at PwC, so I understood technology well before the first startup. I started building BILL in 2006, but I had already built PayCycle, America's first online payroll company, which later became a cloud company. When we started PayCycle in 1999, we weren't thinking about it as a cloud company, but that gave me strong technology expertise as well. And then there was the trust-building expertise. I had experience working with SMBs through accountants and through partnerships at PayCycle, and we made it part of our strategy from day one to ensure we would be multi-pronged in our channel and distribution approach, going direct, through accountants, and through partners. We had been building and serving those constituents since day one. We signed our first partnership in 2008 with the AICPA's division, [CPA.com](http://CPA.com?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), to provide a core part of the client advisory services they were building out. In fact, our platform remains the number one tool accountants use to deliver client advisory services. So when you ask why I felt well-suited to do it, I really understood the pain point because I had been an SMB myself at PayCycle. I had spent a fair bit of time doing back-office work and wondering why it was so painful. I had that customer-centric understanding of the pain point. I also had the domain expertise around SMBs, finance, and software, and the technology expertise. I had the network connections too. When you're starting a company, it helps enormously to have those, whether it's employees who come to work with you, investors who back you, or partners who end up partnering with you. All the things that are critical to building success, I can almost always point back to a network connection. # What was the initial idea? The original idea was to have [a place to manage all your money in and out](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms), not from a general ledger perspective, but from a cash management perspective. I am fairly structured in how I think about which bills to pay, which ones not to pay, which invoices to collect on, and which ones not to collect on. The problem was that the processes involved were entirely manual and hard to pull together—sticky notes, plenty of touch points in the office, walking around talking to people, filing cabinets. The genesis was that in order to manage cash, you really need to have the context around the transactions. 2006 to today. Our mission statement is to make it [simple to connect and do business](https://www.bill.com/demo-request?utm_campaign=corp-comms). The ‘simple to connect’ part isn't just about connecting with the people you work with. It's about connecting to the documents and the workflow around all of that. Doing business is obviously about moving money. Today, over 1% of GDP flows through BILL. We have 8 million network entities, a billion documents stored, and trillions of dollars moved through the platform over the years. We have managed to make it simple to connect and do business at real scale, and what's exciting is that we're really just beginning. We estimate we have about 4-5% market penetration today, and we are the leading firm in this space. So there is a tremendous amount of room and opportunity still to go after. # How did you approach market validation in the early days, and how has it changed? Who to serve really came naturally to me. The businesses my parents were involved in were always centered around small businesses and accountants, so I had a deep affinity for that segment based on what I saw growing up. One of the things I observed was just [how critical SMBs were to the communities](https://www.bill.com/solutions/small-businesses?utm_campaign=corp-comms) they belong to. They were the ones creating opportunities and solving problems that hadn't been solved before. So I was always focused on who is actually helping those businesses succeed, because most people don't think about that with the same passion and energy. We work hard to make sure our employees understand what SMBs do for their communities and why that matters. That passion is contagious within the employee base and allows us to build better products and services. The target customer was always going to be SMBs. We wanted businesses that were big enough to have complexity, but not so big that they already had teams in place to solve that complexity in financial operations. That essentially means businesses from a couple of million up to a couple of hundred million in revenue; a pretty wide range. | If you look at the success we've had, we've done exceptionally well at attracting those customers to the platform. For early validation, a lot of it came through the network. I reached out to people I knew in the Valley who had businesses and asked them to use the product. Sometimes they said no, sometimes they said yes, and sometimes they used it and had issues. One of the more meaningful validation moments came about a year into building the product. We were getting ready to go to a conference, and I was giving a run-through of the demo to my dad. He had heard me talk about what I was building for a couple of years. When I finished the demo, his reaction has stayed with me ever since. He said, "Holy shit, RenĂ©, I can't believe you've come up with something that I've needed my whole life. This is going to be big." Since my dad had run multiple small businesses over his lifetime, that meant everything to me. It gave me the conviction and confidence that I was really onto something. The partnership with [CPA.com](http://CPA.com?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill), which came together roughly 18 months into founding the company, also gave me strong validation that we would be able to reach accountants effectively. # How did you build the early team? My first hire was an engineering manager who also coded. The first engineer he brought on was [Eric Chan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-chan-3262a41/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). Eric is still with the company, almost 20 years later. He has played every role imaginable, from being a 10x engineer to Head of Engineering to Distinguished Engineering Fellow. And now he's back as CTO, leading our AI platform strategy into this next phase of the company. [Henrique Ceribelli](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceribelli/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) also joined almost 20 years ago, and both were absolutely critical in the early days. Listed. From a broader team-building philosophy, I would always encourage other entrepreneurs and founders to be very clear about what you expect from the team, and not be afraid to change those expectations as the company evolves. Be comfortable moving people into different roles as needs shift. There were always those conversations with Eric and Henrique. It was never about telling them they were going to go do something whether they liked it or not. It was always about being in it together, making the best use of their capabilities and interests, and going from there. I think that approach is really important. The ability to have those direct conversations is something I actually did not do as well in my first company. It was harder for me to have those conversations back then, and it's obviously better when you can. That's something I carried forward and improved on when building BILL. # What is the one thing that has really helped go from zero to 1% of GDP today? We built the company with intention. It was always about what we needed for the endgame, not just thinking about what we needed this year. One clear example of building with intention is the way we approached moving money. It is a trust-based business and exceptionally difficult to do. There are tremendous compliance, risk, and credit issues, and all sorts of other challenges involved. From day one, we treated that with the utmost care, operating as though we were already moving 1% of GDP and needed to do it the right way from the start. Source: | Source: | Another example, which goes to the core of our distribution model, is our early and sustained focus on accountants. We have just under 10,000 accounting firms using the platform today. It has changed the game for them. It is the fastest-growing part of their practice, and we offer tools they simply can’t get from anyone else. From the very beginning, it was about understanding their needs, how they could be more successful and more valuable to their clients, and then building capabilities and services specifically for them. If you look at our business today, probably more than half of our customers come through the accounting channel, making it a key distribution engine for us. # How did the accountancy channel progress and grow? It has been pretty consistent throughout. In the early days, it may have been an even higher proportion, but over the last 10 years it has been somewhere in the range of 50-60%. What has happened is that we have been able to develop the market so that more and more accounting firms come into it. Then we have been able to develop tools and capabilities so that each accounting firm steadily brings more of their clients onto the platform. We have firms today that have thousands of clients on BILL. That is the significant impact we are having on those businesses, and on their ability to drive revenue and value for their clients. What is also worth noting is that | That depth of daily engagement is what makes the relationship so strong and so durable over time. # What were the darkest times along the journey? The most challenging period was 2008. The Global Financial Crisis was unfolding, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer in February of that year and passed away in September, and one month after he died, we laid off 40% of the company. We were 26 employees at the time, so we went down to 15. It was a significant moment. On top of all of that, our assets were frozen because of something called ‘auction-rate securities’. The market for them had become completely illiquid, which nobody had ever anticipated. Our last funding round was essentially locked up, and we had no access to it. There were a huge number of challenges hitting at once, and the company was still very young. COVID was also a very demanding period, particularly in the first couple of months. There was a tremendous amount of work to manage through that. # What did you learn from your parents that stuck with you in business? I learned tremendous grit and perseverance from both my dad and my mom. My dad exemplified that in a very personal way. He was born with six fingers, four on his left hand and two on his right. He wanted to play piano, but nobody would teach him, so he taught himself during one summer. He did it by playing every single day until his fingers bled. By the end of that summer, he could play any song he could hum. That doesn't happen unless someone plays the piano ten hours a day, working out to make six fingers sound like twenty. So that grit and perseverance he completely embodied has left a deep impression on me. My mom demonstrated her own version of that same quality. She wasn't someone who naturally gravitated toward programming, but she became the programmer across many of the family businesses. Beyond that, one of our core values at BILL is authenticity, and I trace that directly back to my parents. Even though they came from a different time and held different political views, there was never any judgment about people. They were always welcoming and open to their employees, customers, and friends. That is a quality I try to bring to BILL. We are not going to judge each other; we are going to work together, embrace our differences, agree to disagree when we need to, and accept that we are all humans trying to get through life. It sounds philosophical, but it is something I genuinely learned from watching my parents. | My mom also had a strong appreciation for being present in the moments that matter. Whether it was watching the sunset every night or stopping to look at a flower, she had that quality of actually being there. I think that is deeply connected to how you sustain yourself over twenty-plus years of building a company. You can get so caught up in the rat race that you lose sight of appreciating the moments with your employees, with your customers, or just in nature. # What keeps you motivated after 20 years? It is the same thing that got me started on day one: customers and employees. I wanted to build a great place to work and [products that served SMBs](https://www.bill.com/solutions/small-businesses?utm_campaign=corp-comms) and allowed them to get back to what they love. Those two things have not changed. Sometimes people set a goal of starting a business to reach a certain revenue number or a certain level of personal wealth, and the problem with those goals is that they come and go. You may not ever actually hit them anyway. Every single day, I have been able to wake up knowing that I am doing something that helps more businesses operate better and gives my employees a better place to work. Those two things are my motivating points, and they are as alive for me today as they were at the beginning. Every job has its challenges. The key is to focus on the things that give you energy, and it comes back to the idea of presence, being in tune with what actually fuels you. Twenty years in, still pointing at the future. # What does the next 20 years look like for BILL? What we have started continues to grow and reach more and more businesses. When I think about the next 20 years, it is about taking our roughly 4–5% market share today and growing it into something much larger. There is no reason why that shouldn't happen, because the pain points are real and we are the leading firm in this space. The way we get there is by continuing to peel back the onion, unpack more financial processes that are currently very mundane, and leverage AI to solve them. A concrete example of that is our first supplier-management [AI agent, which handles W-9 collection](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_campaign=corp-comms). All we need is an email address; then we go out to collect the W9 and make sure it is stored in the system so that at the end of the year, the customer can automatically generate a 1099 for that contractor. Our customers don't have to do anything. That type of automation is going to continue, and we have a lot of ideas in that space that will keep making it simpler for businesses to feel that financial operations are something they don’t have to worry about. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). And here is the thing. If you asked every SMB what actually gets them motivated, they would tell you it is solving a problem for the world and spending time with people they like. But you only get to do that if all the administrative burden of running a business is taken care of for you. That’s what we have started to do, and I think we have done it rather well given the scale we have reached. The opportunity over the next 20 years is enormous, and we are just getting started. There are [so many more things we can automate](https://www.bill.com/product/ai?utm_campaign=corp-comms) under the covers for SMBs so they can get back to what they love, which is really working with their customers and employees. # Tara Wellington, VP of Product Management at BILL [Tara Wellington](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarawellington/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) is the VP of Product Management at [BILL](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms). She built her product career almost entirely in the small business software world. Eight years at GoDaddy, rising from program manager to senior director of product, then VP of Product at PandaDoc, the document-workflow platform that hit unicorn status during her tenure. She joined BILL to lead its customer experience platform and recently expanded her scope to include the integration layer connecting BILL's payments, AP, and spend products into a single experience. [Tara](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarawellington/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). Tara came to product through marketing and communications, spending her early career in PR and digital comms before pivoting into product management in 2014. Since then, she's built and shipped products for small business owners across three companies with the same problem at the center: that financial operations are too slow, too manual, and too scattered. Inside BILL, she's the person redesigning how product squads own and ship, and in Spend & Expense at least, the velocity results are already showing. # What role do you play at BILL today? I lead product for our [Spend & Expense](https://www.bill.com/product/spend-and-expense?utm_campaign=corp-comms) business line and also for our [Integrated Experiences](https://www.bill.com/integrations?utm_campaign=corp-comms) team. The Spend & Expense team is focused on our expense management, spending controls, and our credit product. The Integrated Experiences team is focused on the connective tissue, both experientially and platform-wise, across all of our products. The core questions we are trying to answer are related to how we can make our accounts payable, spend, and expense products work better together. Source: | Source: | # What problems would you tackle to create a smooth user experience across products? Increasingly, customers want more and more of their financial operations managed within a single platform. There is real fatigue with juggling multiple products, companies, contracts, and subscriptions, and that is something the market is very familiar with right now. Many companies are offering more of these services, and BILL is no different. Our customers want these things to work together rather than feel like disconnected pieces. Beyond just reducing that fatigue, it simply makes sense from a financial operations perspective. Being able to see all of your cash flow in one place and manage money across accounts payable, credit, and merchant spend all together. That is genuinely valuable and not just a convenience play. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/your-financial-operations-platform-is-here?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). We are focused on making sure our workflows are properly integrated, that our AI is working cohesively across the full experience, that moving between products feels delightful rather than jarring, and that discovering and using multiple products within a single experience is easy and intuitive. We have been working on this for a while, but we are now putting a much stronger and more deliberate focus on it. The goal is to make BILL feel like [one unified financial operations platform](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms) rather than a collection of separate tools sitting next to each other. # How does the product org operate at a macro level? I think about it as running a product playbook. At the highest level, we start with strategy, thinking about what strategy we want to unlock for the business. From there, they flow down into the Integrated Experiences and the Spend & Expense world. Once we have that strategy well articulated, I work closely with the product teams to identify the main objectives we want to pursue within each strategic focus area. Teams take ownership and lay out their plans, starting with an annual planning process. We begin at the objective level, move to the key results level, and then move into roadmapping. This approach gives teams enough top-down guidance from the corporate and org strategy level, while also giving them enough autonomy and input to feel genuine motivation, connection, and accountability to the areas they own. That way, they can lead, drive, and make great decisions that fit naturally within the broader framework rather than feeling like they are just executing someone else's plan. The org chart, in the wild. Below the annual level, we do quarterly planning with six-week check-ins. At the six-week mark, we check how we’re doing, whether we’re executing and hitting the metrics we expected. At the end of each quarter, there’s a broader check-in to assess whether we need to change anything going into the next quarter or we feel good continuing with the existing plan. That combination gives us a longer-term view for things like platform capabilities and bigger projects where you need to think well ahead, while also giving us the agility to make adjustments within the quarter as needed. That responsiveness is especially important in the AI space right now. Things are changing so quickly that you need to move and adapt faster than you used to. It is actually a really fun time to work in product because you are collecting all the inputs—feedback from sales, customer experience, customer success managers working with existing customers, from the market, what competitors are doing, and where we want to lead. Coming together to make decisions about what we are going to focus on in the next year is energizing. # How do you stop BILL from becoming a product that is everything for everyone? Focused. | I think about this along two scopes. On the customer-targeting side, BILL is very clearly and deliberately focused on the SMB customer set. We have not tried to narrow down too aggressively within that segment because we do believe we can serve SMBs broadly and be a strong partner for them. But we are not trying to go upmarket and chase enterprise customers. | That is how we maintain discipline on the customer side. We know who we are for, and we [stay focused on solving their problems](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms) rather than trying to be all things to all people. On the jobs-to-be-done side, we hyper-focus on financial operations. That’s the domain we have committed to own for our customers. And within financial operations, the value propositions we focus on are very specific to efficiency, control, accuracy, and better financial decision-making. That clarity about which problems we are going to solve and which ones we are not is what keeps us grounded even as the product grows broader. So, in summary, we allow ourselves to be somewhat broader on the customer segment because SMBs are a wide and varied group, but we get very precise about which problems we are going to solve for them. That combination of a well-defined customer and a well-defined problem space is what keeps BILL from sprawling into something unfocused. # Where does AI sit in the roadmap today, and how are you thinking about it? AI is the number one priority across the product organization, and we are thinking about it in two distinct ways. The first is the big-picture question of how the product needs to fundamentally transform in the age of AI. How do we go from being a tool and workflow enabler to being a true partner and a vehicle for genuine automation? We already have [strong automation within BILL](https://www.bill.com/product/ai?utm_campaign=corp-comms), and we have several agents working in the product, but the question we are constantly pushing on is how we can drive that much further. So at the product level, AI is something we think about holistically across the entire organization, including all the work we are doing within our AI platform to consistently uplevel AI capabilities across BILL. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/your-financial-operations-platform-is-here?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). The second way we think about it is at the individual team and feature level, where each team is independently asking how AI is going to transform their particular area. Spend & Expense is a good example. People are spending in all kinds of contexts, and the biggest challenge we see for both the person spending and the admin managing it is the reconciliation that comes next. Nobody wants to submit receipts or categorize things manually. So we are working toward truly touchless transactions, where AI handles all of that reconciliation automatically. That is an example of going very deep into a specific customer problem and asking how AI can make that customer's life meaningfully better in that particular area. So we have AI working at two levels simultaneously. The broad transformational level where we are rethinking the entire product experience, and the specific feature level where we are solving concrete customer pain points. Both are happening in parallel, and both are genuinely exciting to be working on right now. We are also doing a tremendous amount of AI application internally. That internal transformation is just as important as what we are building for customers, and it is very much underway across the organization. # Who leads the AI teams internally, and how does AI transformation work across the entire company? It’s actually a combination of several different structures working together rather than a single centralized team or leader. We have our IT team driving all the tooling and managing how we operate and run day-to-day. They sit within our CTO organization, which has a very strong focus on AI, things like what tools teams need, what the setup looks like, and what BILL's own internal platform stack should be. We also have an AI platform team that is hyper-focused on what the AI platform looks like for our customers, making sure we are building consistently and accurately, and that we are always leveraging the latest technology. That is a large group of people whose entire focus is driving and leading the AI platform thinking for the customer-facing side of the business. | Then, within the Integrated Experiences team, we have a very cross-functional group that focuses on the overall experience of BILL and how it needs to change to become more AI-native. That covers things like our help experience, [our overall agentic chat capability](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_campaign=corp-comms), and the work we are doing to make BILL available through other agentic and AI channels. And then at the feature team level, you have individual pods working on specific AI-driven problems. There is a group working on touchless transactions, another group working on accounts payable intake, and so on across the product. So the honest answer is that AI is permeating everywhere at once. AI is a full transformation of how BILL works and operates, both internally and for our customers. # What has RenĂ© imparted on product in relation to building for the long term? My favorite thing about RenĂ© is that he is the number one customer champion at BILL. That level of passion and consistent focus on the customer is something I find genuinely inspiring, and I think it permeates the entire organization in a meaningful way. The product team is already supposed to be the voice of the customer within the building process. René’s constant reinforcement of that makes it easier for product to keep the customer at the absolute heart of everything we do. We are solving for small businesses, financial operations, and accountants, and that has to be the foundation of every decision we make. René’s consistency in his messaging and his habit of always bringing customer stories to the table shape the culture and [the way we work at BILL](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms) so much that it is hard to fully quantify but very easy to feel. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). What is also really special is that RenĂ© does not just talk about customers from a distance—he is genuinely our number one user. He lives and breathes the product the same way the product team does. I occasionally get an email from him flagging something he noticed while using the product himself. For example, we have a Spend & Expense integration with Gmail that automatically pulls receipts from your inbox, and he is in there using it and sending feedback directly. Having a CEO who is that hands-on and in touch with what the team is building is something genuinely rare and really energizing to be around. # What is most exciting for you and the product team in the next phase of growth? I will take a Spend & Expense slant on this since it is the area closest to my heart right now. When we think about its future, | Everything else should be handled automatically. On the admin side, you should never have to chase anyone on your team again to get what you need to close the books. You should not be spending hours setting up travel policies, sending reminders, or manually reconciling transactions. All of that work is exactly what we are focused on eliminating through the agentic transformation we are building. The other piece that I am really excited about goes beyond the product itself and is about rethinking the channels through which people want to interact with us. Particularly on the admin side, the assumption that someone always needs to log into a product or open a mobile app is increasingly outdated. This is really a fundamental reframe of the whole relationship between BILL and our customers. Instead of asking how customers fit into BILL, we are asking how BILL fits into their lives and their existing workflows. That shift in thinking is a really big push for us over the next year, and it is something I find genuinely exciting to be working on. # In what ways do you try to move consistently when delivering products? Within Spend & Expense and Integrated Experiences, our approach is built around dedicated squads with a durable, clear scope. Each squad owns a single initiative with clear OKRs against it, and then we essentially get out of their way. We reduce dependencies, provide as much focus as we can, and let them run. A good example is the multi-entity work we've been doing for Spend & Expense. We set up a team whose entire job was that one customer: what are their needs, what capabilities need building, what's the MVP, and what does the iteration look like from there? They're not juggling a thousand things. They're obsessed with that one problem, making their own decisions, and running as fast as they can. Getting the decision-making overhead and matrix dependencies out of the way is what really unlocks speed. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/take-control-of-your-travel-spend?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). The second part is the internal platform work within Integrated Experiences. That team makes sure the right platform capabilities are in place, so other teams can build on top of them efficiently, rather than starting from zero every time. The results have been tangible. Since we rolled out this focused squad structure, velocity picked up massively over the three quarters that followed, and what we shipped in Q1, Q2, and Q3 this year grew at an incredible pace. The agentic tools helped, but the core unlock was giving people clear decision-making authority within a well-defined structure and trusting them to run. Watching that light up velocity across those teams has been one of the most rewarding things I've seen since stepping into this role. # How big are the squads you mentioned, and what do they typically look like? It depends on the initiative, but we typically structure a squad around a core trio at the center, which is an engineering manager, a designer, and a product manager. They are the ones driving the decision-making, maintaining the focus, and keeping the squad moving in the right direction. They are then paired with a set of engineers. Some of our [agentic squads](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_campaign=corp-comms) are running much leaner than that, while some of our platform squads have more engineers, depending on the complexity and scale of what they are building. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). Beyond that core group, we also have research and product marketing involved. They work in close partnership with the squad rather than being fully embedded within it. The critical thing is that everyone in that squad is completely dedicated to that one initiative until it ships. There is no splitting attention across multiple projects or teams. That singular focus is what allows them to move quickly and make great decisions, because everyone in the room is deeply immersed in the same problem and working toward the same outcome. # Ariege Misherghi, SVP, Product Management - AP/AR & Accountant at BILL [Ariege Misherghi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariege/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill) is the SVP, Product Management - AP/AR & Accountant at [BILL](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms), a role she stepped into in late 2024. Ariege spent the better part of her career at Intuit, where she spent 15 years building products for accountants and their SMB clients, most recently as VP of Product Management for AI and Human Expertise at QuickBooks. Before Intuit, she held an early customer service role at PayCycle, the online payroll company RenĂ© founded before BILL. She's now the person responsible for BILL's most strategically important customer relationships. What makes her an unusual hire is how long she watched BILL from the other side. Fifteen years at Intuit, building for the same accountants, gave her the point of view that the accountant-client relationship is not transactional, and that very few technology companies treat it as anything else. She took a customer service role at PayCycle expecting to find it routine. She found it meaningful. Hearing directly from business owners what happened when payroll didn't arrive on time appears to have shaped everything that came after. # What was RenĂ© like as a leader when you worked at PayCycle? Landing at PayCycle was an interesting story for me. I started interviewing locally and went into PayCycle to interview for a customer service job. I didn’t know if I wanted to work in customer service, but I needed the practice. When I walked in, there was this panel of interviewers, and they were incredible, brilliant people. I accepted the role because they were genuinely amazing humans I wanted to be around and really learn from. To my shock, I was amazed by how much I loved helping customers. Because it was a payroll company, the stakes were real. If someone's employees don't get paid, somebody can't pay their mortgage. You'd take a call with someone really fired up, and our charter was: help every customer, figure it out, because the stakes are high. That freedom to work the system in favor of the customer gave me a lot of joy. That was the customer-centric environment RenĂ© created. Brilliant people in every corner, genuinely good humans who were also really sharp. The people I worked with in customer service are still my dearest friends today. Very capable people who all came together because they believed in the mission, loved the community, and felt the freedom to do good work. That's the kind of guy RenĂ© is. He was a smart, capable person I wanted to learn from, and most importantly, he was a good human. # How does RenĂ© lead today? What's really attractive about RenĂ© is that he's incredibly humble. Just like before, he believes deeply in the work he's doing in service of business owners. He's trying to tip the odds in their favor. He hires smart, mission-driven people who can learn from each other. All of that is still true. What I really love about BILL and the culture RenĂ© has created is that there are some universal truths that everyone is getting behind, and there's no question about them, no matter how much the market debates them. He knows for certain he's going to bet on accountants every day, and that investing in small businesses is investing in the community. He walks around with a lot more confidence, a lot more swagger. And I think it's because he's just really comfortable in his skin and in those very clear beliefs. # What does BILL do differently? One of the reasons I chose to join BILL is because of the relationship the company has with the accounting professional community. What that looks like is an unwavering belief that we have a responsibility to honor the accountant-client relationship. I don't think that's true everywhere. It might be true in other places so long as it serves the bottom line. But at BILL, [respect for the firm-client relationship](https://www.bill.com/demo-request?utm_campaign=corp-comms) is in the fabric of how we work. No matter what wave of technology is washing over us at any given moment, the belief here is that the relationship between an accountant and their client is sacred. It comes from a really deep understanding of how important an accountant is in the life of a small business owner, and that it is not a transactional relationship between them. It's not about the coding or the report generation. It's really about the advice, the guidance, the trust. You don't get that confidence from a model. # How do go-to-market and product work together to serve accountants? For starters, there's no intermediary between the product team and our customers. Product leaders here are expected to stay close to customers directly. On top of that, our account management team talks to far more customers than product management ever could on its own. We have a lot of respect for our customer success and account management counterparts, and deep, ongoing relationships with them are built into how we operate and how we decide what to build. That creates a closed feedback loop between product, customer success, customer support, and account management. I genuinely think it's part of our secret sauce. At other places I've worked, product talks to customers and sales talks to customers, but the two never really came together. I was never in a conversation where we'd sit down and ask why firms are leaving the product, or dig into what's driving attrition with the people who are actually on the phone with a customer at the moment they decide to cancel. That conversation was always kept separate. What I love at BILL is [how integrated the functions are](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms), so the information flows freely. We compare notes. We have debates. Product owns the vision and the roadmap, but we feel genuinely accountable to our account management and customer success counterparts. # How is AI changing the way accountants interact with BILL today? If you go to any event in this profession, they're talking about two things. One is the absolute lack of capacity: demand is high, talent is scarce, and there aren't enough people to get the work done. Second, they're talking about [how to use AI to automate more](https://www.bill.com/product/ai?utm_campaign=corp-comms). What's interesting is that people rarely connect the two directly. My framing is that the question isn't just how you hire but how you build the capacity you need to deliver the service. And the reason AI is on people's radar but isn't something they rely on yet is that they haven't figured out how to use it to create that capacity. They know they need to engage with it, but they're not there yet. When I think about BILL's AI investments in the AP world specifically, we're pointing at two fundamental problems. The first is capacity—how do you create more of it without adding headcount? The second is risk. The more work accountants take on, the more liability they open themselves up to, so I'm leaning hard into how you eliminate the risk of AP and create a risk-free environment. If those are the two biggest problems firms and businesses have, those are the two spaces I'm pointing every technology tool I have toward. Source: [BILL](https://www.bill.com/blog/bill-launches-new-ai-agents?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill). At BILL, we don't think small. Vendors often frame AI as automation. What I like about our approach is asking what we can delete, what we can cut out of the equation entirely so you never have to do it at all. That creates time and capacity far more effectively than just speeding up the same steps. # How does BILL actually make that risk-free element work in practice? There are a few dimensions of risk. Operational risk is about whether you're following your policies, whether timelines are met, and whether an invoice actually came in. Non-fraud financial risk covers duplicate bills, anomalous amounts, and errors. And then there's fraud, where BILL has been exceptional at identifying and stopping it. Here's an example of where this is going. Once a business owner is no longer authorizing every payment, you need an approval process, and those checks and balances are [one of the reasons people love BILL](https://www.bill.com/?utm_campaign=corp-comms). Usually that means a finance person confirming a bill is categorized correctly, or an operator confirming the vendor is real and the work was delivered. That's real heavy lifting, someone interrupting their day to run through the same steps for every single bill. BILL is well positioned to look at that, understand your role, and make an initial pass. Low-risk items we can clear without a person and mark as ready. Where we have questions, we surface only those for human attention. And where something doesn't clear the baseline bar we've set, we'll decline it per your policy, even if a person might have let it through. On the backend, making sure agents perform correctly is its own craft—agent evaluation, golden datasets, and clear criteria for assessing performance. On top of that, user permission restricts what an agent can do, and a human can step into the loop at any point. The audit trails are deep and intentional. We actually start the design there. If we're building an agent to do something, we ask what the audit trail needs to look like for us to be confident it's doing exactly what you asked, nothing more, at the quality you'd expect. # Extra reading [The Fintech King & BILL’s 20-Year Race To $1 Trillion](https://www.opensourceceo.com/p/bill-zero-to-one)- August, 2026[More Business Travel Means More Financial Complexity for SMBs](https://smallbusinesscurrents.com/2026/06/01/more-business-travel-means-more-financial-complexity-for-smbs/?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill)- June, 2026[5 benefits of automation for businesses](https://www.bill.com/blog/benefits-of-automation-in-business?utm_source=www.opensourceceo.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unfiltered-the-long-game-at-bill)- Unknown **BRAIN FOOD** 🧠 **TOOLS WE RECOMMEND đŸ› ïž** Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. 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