The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Clayton: M&A before $100M in revenue is just a distraction
“Before a hundred million, it's just a distraction.”
Lacerte: Startups must bridge legacy habits to cross the digital divide
“You can't force a crossing of the digital divide overnight. So all of your listeners, everybody's trying to force that crossing. They had this great idea. We're trying to force that, but you can't, you have to have a bridge.”
Lacerte: Bill made heavy infrastructure investments that drove no direct revenue
“There's plenty of investment that we made over the years that didn't help us acquire customers. It didn't help us increase revenue. It was like, no, we just have to build infrastructure.”
Schuck: Startups must develop talent internally rather than hiring from tech giants
“Because you're not going to go out and get the best people from Salesforce or Bill.com or wherever. You're going to get people who are not those people who have an aspiration for the future of being those people, the same way we all do in our startup, and you'…”
Bill.com transaction revenue has surpassed its subscription revenue
“If you looked at our quarter last quarter we have now surpassed our revenues. Subscription pricing revenue has now been surpassed by transaction-based pricing revenue.”
Clayton: Vertical GTM works without changing the underlying product
“Thinking about a go-to-market skin that's verticalized from messaging standpoint, from customer references, even segmenting customer, ah, sales teams so that they're calling specific verticals just makes you much more effective. You're not even changing the pr…”
Clayton: International Expansion Is Currently a Distraction for Bill.com
“Bill.com. It's almost, outside of one recent acquisition, it's almost a hundred percent domestic. We have, you know, depending on how you count it, if you count all our acquisitions, yeah, maybe we have 300,000 customers. There's six million SMBs in the US alo…”
SaaS startups must rely on self-serve or direct sales under $100M
“If you want to control your own sales, control your own destiny, you either have a great self-serve platform or you have your own sales force.”
Clayton: Companies hit diminishing sales channel returns around $100M revenue
“Usually at zero to a hundred million dollars, you might have a couple of sales motions, maybe a couple, a few marketing channels. It's much simpler. You focus, but then after sometimes, sometime around a hundred million dollars, you tend to Start hitting dimin…”
Clayton: SaaS bundling only works for similar-sized companies with complementary products
“It works if you're like-sized companies, and you have a very complimentary offering that's selling into the same buyer persona.”
Lemkin: The majority of Bill.com's revenue no longer comes from software
“The majority of bill.com's revenue is no longer from software.”
Ibarra: SaaStr runs its revenue cycle through headless Salesforce
“It shows you what he's hooked up to headless within Salesforce too, because there's multiple things running into this. So he's got class. I call it classic Salesforce for sales, right? So Salesforce CRM that our sales team has always used for like 10 years. He…”
Lacerte: Accounting firms make up bulk of Bill's client base
“So the accounting firms do represent a big bulk of client base.”
Lacerte: Bill.com took a decade to achieve meaningful revenue before IPO
“It took us, like you said, it was probably, 10 years before we started having meaningful revenue that others like, huh, that company might go public. And then you fast forward kind of two years later, three years later, we're filing for the IPO. We're launchin…”
Lacerte: An early Bill investor brought in outside counsel for regulatory compliance
“I think it was probably our series E or D. So we ended up getting to I for IPO. But in one of our investments, one of the investors is you know what? I'm not sure you guys have all the right regulatory stuff. I'm going to bring my outside counsel in to really …”
Lacerte: Bill.com requires upfront contractual commitments from bank partners
“The banks are very different, right? That's kind of elephant hunting. And so the teams there, they get the bank committed upfront and we drive that commitment in the contract to make sure that there is a commitment.”
Lacerte: Bill quotas accounting channel reps on revenue and client count
“The accounts, we look at it signed in the same way as it would direct, but we look at the account, the revenue per accounting firm, right? So the quota is driven off of that. I see. And then they have an incentive to get X clients on board.”
Lacerte: Bill.com has 3.2 million network members
“The opportunity for us to take this 3.2 million network members and give them something that is a paying product.”
Lacerte: Bill grew its network by pricing ACH at 29¢ versus checks
“And on the payment side, we'd be like, we'll just cut you a check. So we didn't force people to connect their vendors, but then we did incentives from a pricing perspective, a check was A dollar 49 or whatever, a dollar 69 a day, and an ACH was 29 cents. So th…”
Lacerte: Bill net revenue retention increased to 124%
“In fact, I think in the last quarter numbers, we announced that the net revenue retention had bumped up to one 24, right?”
Divvy went from first institutional round to $2.5B exit in four years
“We went from our first institutional round of funding to getting acquired in, in about four years, right? In a two and a half billion dollar exit.”
Clayton: Bill.com revenue growth accelerated in each quarter since IPO
“If you look at our last four quarters since we've been public, every quarter it's accelerated in terms of growth.”
Tom Clayton still personally interviews every candidate joining his team
“I interview every single person, even to this day, and when I first start, the teams hate it.”