Helen Hastings
Founder & CEO, Quanta. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerLinkedIn ↗usequanta.com ↗
Helen Hastings is the founder and CEO of Quanta, an AI-powered accounting platform. She previously worked as a software engineer at Affirm, where she built financial systems of record.
2shows
2appearances
42statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Helen Hastings said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hastings: Pilot and competitors relied on large manual staffs using QuickBooks
“So pilots, any of the ones we just talked about, They have hired a very large staff that is just using QuickBooks. So they did not start by building their own QuickBooks replacement. They started using QuickBooks, and they started by hiring a lot of people, an…”
Hastings: Startups cannot win by starting as financial point solutions
“I do not believe that you can start as a point solution and eventually take it all over. You need to be the full source of truth for day one.”
Hastings: Gen AI cannot vibe code robust accounting software like QuickBooks
“QuickBooks is not something you can vibe code. The numbers need to be accurate. The foundation needs to be robust. The properties need to be built to scale and who knows, maybe Gen AI will get better in many years, but it cannot build something with that level…”
Hastings: Relying on manual labor prevents startups from transitioning to automation
“So once you hire the people to do it, and once you're supporting that, it's very hard to go the other way and come back to the automation.”
Hastings: NetSuite cannot handle the transaction scale of consumer companies like Affirm
“NetSuite cannot handle the scale of something like a firm or any consumer company where you have, you're tracking millions to even billions of money movement events throughout the day.”
Hastings: Quanta Raised a $4.7M Seed Round Pre-Product and Pre-Revenue
“There were no employees. Yeah. Pre-product, pre-revenue.”
Hastings: Startups should make design partners pay from the beginning
“Paying from the beginning. I think that's really important to make sure that the customer says this thing is valuable enough for me to pay.”
Hastings: Offshore bookkeeping firms do not understand modern SaaS expenses
“The main firms that do this are offshoring and by no fault of the bookkeepers, they just don't know the latest SaaS trends, the latest tools. They don't know the difference between AWS and buying some office furniture off of Amazon.”
Hastings: Early-stage companies want accounting work done, not software
“And the reality is that early stage companies that they don't want an accounting software. They just want the work to be done. They want the peace of mind. They want it off their plate.”
Hastings: Bench Accounting planned to monetize via banking cards, not software automation
“I'd actually got a peek into what their plans to monetize were because they were very, very margin negative on their accounting, and it was actually things like working into these banks and expense cards. They were not actually trying to automate the work of a…”
Hastings: Having engineers do manual operations is the best path to automation
“I really think that is the best way to build an automated product because the engineers have to understand the domain very, very deeply.”
Hastings: Low-end bookkeeping will become fully automated with hourly CPA support
“I think that's where bookkeeping at the lower end of the market is moving, where people will eventually be more comfortable With the software, just handling everything as they see that it works, and then they pay hourly for any edge case specific situations th…”
Hastings: Traditional bookkeeping fails because outsourced bookkeepers lack software context
“So one reason that traditional bookkeeping tends to be so painful is that it's often outsourced to people that are maybe overseas and they, they're great, but they just don't have the context of what our software business is doing and what are the vendors that…”
Hastings: Plaid is not accurate or sufficient for full bookkeeping
“So Plaid isn't a hundred percent accurate. I will say that we use a mix of Plaid and Finicity and other tools and the, but the best is when companies have APIs where the data is coming in? Well, the reason that Plaid isn't enough is that there's always small t…”
Hastings: QuickBooks Lacks Automated Checks and Requires Manual Data Verification
“And the way QuickBooks is set up is it just makes it really easy for you to make those mistakes, because it doesn't have all these checks built in. It's really just sort of a blank slate you can write into, and the only way to verify that the data is correct i…”
Hastings: Bench failure left customers without access to critical financial data
“You think of the companies like Bench going out of business and people have no access to their history of the most critical business data.”
Hastings: QuickBooks' generic database approach prevents it from serving industries well
“QuickBooks, it can solve for any sort of business model because it's so generic, but because of that, it's sort of just, it's like I said, a blank slate, just a little database. You can write anything into there, and because of that, it can support any busines…”
Hastings: QuickBooks and NetSuite operate as monopolies for US accounting
“QuickBooks is the monopoly for early States companies. And then eventually they switched to NetSuites and really these systems are monopolies. That is what everyone is using in the U S they go through that path”
Hastings: Traditional month-end accounting workbooks lose vital business context
“All of that data is lost because that work is done usually in manual spreadsheets that lives on someone's laptop, and it's done a little bit differently month over month. These are called month-close workbooks, which are always an Excel sheet living on, on som…”
Hastings: AI will reduce two-week corporate financial analysis tasks to instant searches
“I think that's truly how financial analysis is going to feel in, in a shift change, where today it feels like going to the library, teams have to do two weeks of analysis work to answer a single question from the CEO, and after a system like Quanta has taken o…”
Hastings: No single live tool unifies finance and accounting decisions
“There, there's no single tool that both finance and accounting work out of that is the live data source for day-to-day decisions.”
Hastings: The majority of Quanta's customers have fully replaced QuickBooks
“So we fully replaced QuickBooks. So the majority of our customers have no QuickBooks at all.”
Hastings: Quanta Matches Traditional Accounting Service Pricing
“We are pretty similar, actually, and we've gone back and forth a lot about this internally, and I've gone back and forth about it with myself, and you have this dual problem of we're higher quality and we're better, so you think that we should be able to price…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Helen's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MIXERGYLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Quanta | 1 | 21 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Mixergy → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Quanta | 1 | 21 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |