Not An Overnight Success

Your company, Bill.com went public in 2019. Bill.com is highly successful now. But I know that it wasn’t an overnight success story. We first met many years ago when you had just started Bill.com. And I remember, there were some challenging years in the beginning. Most of the market and value growth for you happened around year thirteen – thirteen! That’s a lot of years of building something. Were there times when it felt like it was a really long, hard slog? And how did you get through that?

Yeah, it’s perseverance, passion, grit, all those things help you get through it. And who said 13 was an unlucky number, right? It turned out to be a good year for us. And I think a lot of this is really, you have to stick to it. I knew that businesses had a pain in the back office, I experienced it, I talked to customers, I talked to accountants. I knew that 80% of SMB payments were going out via paper check. And if paper is being involved, you know it’s slow, you know it’s cumbersome, and you know it’s error prone and inaccurate. And so I knew all those facts. And I knew that the technology was the solution. But it was going to take time to build a platform.

And so the way you stick through it is, you believe, you talk to customers, you talk to partners, you look for data points that tell you that it’s working, we just have to keep persevering, and doing the solutions that will help bring more companies into the fold. A lot of the things we did in year thirteen, we started launching other payment products. And they were always part of the vision, the roadmap, if you will, for the company. But it took time to actually build everything else and get it set up that we could do that. And we launched those things and we can see that suppliers wanted those things and business wanted those things.

And so we can start to feel that momentum and that actually has been a big driver of our transaction growth over the last few years. And that’s been a big driver of the overall growth of the company. So, all these things, it’s looking for data points that tell you that you were right. You have to look for ones that tell you that you’re wrong, too. You can’t just cherry pick the ideas that are right. You have to look across all of them. But there’s always data that can help you understand how the business is doing with customers and what the opportunities are in front.