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 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
BILL's direct competitors are not regulated money transmitters
“The part that I think becomes a moat competitively is we move money and it's regulated and we do it well. I don't know any of our competitors that are actually regulated that know how to, we have regulators in our shop all the time.”
Financial platforms only earn the right to monetize payments through software excellence
“We don't get to do your payments unless you love the software that you just talked about. Like we are a software government. We have to make a great experience. We have to make it so that when you're going between buildings, you can actually pay a bill if you …”
Lacerte: Scaled fintechs must own infrastructure because bank partners cannot keep up
“If you're trying to, we wanted the ability to be able to do any type of payment because that's what customers needed. You have to, you know, make sure that you're owning that infrastructure. Versus you're lying on some third party in the bank that's going to h…”
Non-AI SMB spend per customer has been flat for three quarters
“What we've seen this year is more stabilization in the last maybe three quarters. And so I call this the wait and see economy. This is, nobody's investing for growth the way they were three years ago, which is crazy. People were just investing, investing. Obvi…”
Toast is fundamentally a software company despite its payment revenue mix
“I think they are a software company. I think they, again, they earned the right to do essentially clear all the restaurant's revenues because they have great software.”
Founders must define a viable business model before acquiring customers
“Like you don't wait to build the business model. Don't wait to say, Oh, I get the customers. They will come and I'll figure it out. No, have your model. Maybe you don't charge it first, but have a model that says, okay, at this price point, I'm going to be abl…”
BILL maintains an 86% customer logo retention rate
“So what we've shared is that we're at 86% logo retention.”
SMBs never ask for AI, they only ask to solve pain points
“Nobody has ever asked me for a cloud-based software or AI, or what they ask for is, can you get rid of this pain point? And the pain point is they don't like entering data. They don't like workflow. They want to move money fast. Like they asked for those pain …”
Constructive dissatisfaction prevents complacency and drives founder performance
“Being constructively dissatisfied is a good thing in life. And sometimes people think you're dissatisfied. No, I'm constructively dissatisfied. I don't let it grow on me, but no, I can always do better.”
BILL processes 1% of US GDP annually and $1T in five years
“One percent of GDP goes through bill. One percent every year. A trillion dollars has been moved on the platform in the last five years.”
BILL connects 7.1 million network members for immediate vendor onboarding
“The network is a part of that because 7.1 million means that when you sign up today, there's a chance that your vendor is going to be there and that you don't have to worry about figuring out how to pay them.”
Obtaining 50-state money transmitter licenses took BILL at least five years
“Getting all the licenses, the MTLs, money transfer licenses across all 50 states... It was Probably a five year effort, at least.”
Choice overload drives small businesses to demand software consolidation
“So what that tells consumers and all of us is that there's too much choice. Which is why consumers, small businesses, I think of as consumers are asking for consolidation, which is why we've acquired companies is why we built our platform to continue to be ext…”
Many SaaS products are features rather than viable standalone companies
“There's lots of products out there in those thousand companies. Not all of them are standalone companies. And so making sure you think about how do you make that leap to that?”
Supplier payment choices account for 30% of BILL's core revenue
“30% of our core bill revenue comes from suppliers that are making a choice about a payment.”
The entire spend management category has fewer than 100,000 business customers
“If you think about it, there is a lot of excitement around the category, but the category is still less than, I don't know, 75,000, a 100,000 businesses that are using the product.”
American Express, JPMorgan, and Capital One will enter spend management software
“And by the way, Amex and JP Morgan and Capital One, they are going to spend time on this, and we believe that our embedded partnership strategy will help.”
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: B2B payment software defensibility comes from workflow over payment execution
“And I would always start with the payment is the last thing that a customer does, right? It's everything before that matters. Like you're not going to just sign a check or use bill.com to essentially sign a check or actually not trying to pay unless you know w…”
Lacerte: Bill processes $170 billion in run-rate payment volume
“And since all the money goes through us on a run rate basis, a hundred and seventy billion dollars now, since all that money goes through us, we're able to do other things that other players can't.”
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.”
BILL has 250,000 core platform customers out of 475,000 total
“And that's on the, on all three kind of original platforms, if you will, that's Bill, that's Divi, that's Invoice To Go. On the core builds probably around 250,000.”
BILL consistently adds roughly 45,000 customers per quarter
“We've grown customers, right? And so that sense, we are immune. Like we keep adding customers roughly 45,000 a quarter. We've been doing that for a while. That's very consistent growth for us.”
BILL monetizes customer transaction spend in addition to subscription fees
“And our goal was to get people in on subscription. We'll talk more about that later. And then earn the right to do these transactions, which then allow us to make more money. So we make more money on all the spend that you have, not just on the subscription fe…”
BILL's mobile app users have the highest Net Promoter Score
“I think the mobile phone users, they have the highest MPS, right? That's just super simple and super easy.”
Product empathy and dogfooding culture must start with leadership
“It does start at the top. Like I will go into any roadmap discussion and I will be talking about the product. I'm in the UX Slack channel. I'm reporting bugs. And that helps people know that, Hey, this is valued in the culture that we all need to use the appli…”
BILL generated $50M in revenue and had 1M network users in 2017
“Fast forward to 20 17 when, okay, the business is starting to scale. Probably 2017 was fifty million in revenue or something like that. And we had a network that was a million or more.”
BILL once reported 300% year-over-year revenue growth on an earnings call
“To be on a public earnings call and to be public and to say, we grew 300% year over year. That was a fun day. And I knew I'd pay the price later because you can't grow that fast forever.”
BILL operates over 12 distinct payment revenue streams
“Creating these different touchpoints, we have over 12 different payment revenue streams, and that's just a lot.”
BILL employs roughly 100 engineers and product managers solely on payments
“There's an engineering team and a product team that just works on the payment engine. All they do all day long... That team probably is around a hundred or so.”
BILL is beta testing an invoice financing product for suppliers
“We have a new product called invoice financing. That's in alpha beta that lets the supplier say, you know what? I don't want to wait for Jason to pay me in 45 days. He always pays in 45 days, but I don't want to wait for that. I'm going to actually get paid no…”
The core BILL platform has penetrated 3% of US employer businesses
“On the core bill platform out of employers, it's three percent of, so three percent of six million use the core bill”
BILL's spend management product Divvy is growing roughly 30% year-over-year
“And the spend and expense platform that used to be Divi now built, it's growing exceptionally well. So, roughly, 30% year over year.”
BILL processes five million AI document predictions per day
“There's five million predictions a day using AI today on the, all the documents that are coming through Bill.”
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: 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 Scaled Gross Margins From 50% to Near 80%
“We worked hard and probably within five years, we had gross margins that were probably north of 50%, right? And so now our gross margins are close to 75 to 80, somewhere in that range.”
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: Accounting firms make up bulk of Bill's client base
“So the accounting firms do represent a big bulk of client base.”
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?”
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 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 Went Public Partly to Fund M&A with Stock Currency
“When we went public, one of the reasons was to have a currency to be able to add onto the platform to serve more customers with better products.”
Lacerte: Real-Time Payment APIs Enabled the Modern Spend Management Boom
“So one of the things that cascaded with the technology for card payments Is the ability to control card payments, their APIs, real time. And so that's essentially what Divi is doing, right?”