Nick Abouzeid
Co-Founder and CEO, Rivet · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveoperatorinvestor@Nickabouzeid ↗LinkedIn ↗rivet.tax ↗
Nick Abouzeid is the co-founder and CEO of Rivet, an AI-enabled tax preparation firm. He previously held growth leadership roles at Ramp, MainStreet, and Product Hunt, and served as a partner at Shrug Capital.
22statements → 7claims → 2claims resolved → 3.91/5average certainty → 1.59/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 5 assertions · 3 opinions · 7 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Nick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Abouzeid: Tax prep is highly fragmented and targeted by PE roll-ups
“This is a massively fragmented industry. It's largely owned by, you know, accountants themselves who started their own firms and grew it slowly over, you know, two decades and are ready to retire. Private equity firms are getting involved now to roll them up.”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Nick Abouzeid on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Nick Abouzeid said on Sourcery that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Abouzeid: Growth 'secret sauces' and ad tricks are a consulting farce
“None of this exists. This is all a farce. This is all made up to allow people to bill exorbitant consulting rates to tell you that maybe Google ads is not for you.”
Abouzeid: Top growth hires can clearly explain why their metric moved
“The thing that we screened for was, have you owned a number before, and can you verbalize what you did in order to make the number go up? And the best growth people we worked with all could verbalize exactly why the number went up. And they can walk you throug…”
Abouzeid: Do not hire growth talent without defining target metrics first
“It is not a good idea to hire a growth person if you don't know what number they're going to move.”
Abouzeid: Growth team members should each own exactly one isolated metric
“If you make one person responsible for one number and that one number is in a vacuum by itself, not touching anything else, It's very clear if they're doing their job or not. It's very clear if the things that you're doing are working or not.”
Abouzeid: There are no bonus points for complex growth tests over hitting numbers
“There's no bonus points for sexy. There's only bonus points for hitting your number. If you get your number by changing the button text, great. That's awesome. We should be really proud of that. We should celebrate that. We shouldn't just shy away from it beca…”
Abouzeid: Test Website Buttons Before Buying Expensive Personalization Tools
“It's certainly effective, but unless you're, it's such a big scale. Test your buttons first, right? Like that's a very expensive engagement. Take some time to implement it's, you know, focus on the buttons are already there and don't cost anything to test.”
Abouzeid: Rivet raised venture believing it can IPO in 10-15 years
“No, I mean, look, we wouldn't have raised money if we did not think we could go public in 10, 12, 15, right? People have to return their funds. This is not for fun. This is not a hobby, right? We know that we wouldn't have raised money if we didn't think that …”
Abouzeid: Rivet is building an EY competitor, not a startup-only firm
“Ernst & Young is who I look up to. It's not, you know, there are a bunch of startup focused tax prep firms. We are not building one. We are building a better tax prep firm. Just so happens that a lot of our sort of early customers happen to be startups.”
Abouzeid: Personal tax prep firms avoid complex, multi-jurisdiction clients
“There are no personal tax prep firms that are eager to engage with this type of client. Why? They're more sophisticated and time consuming than sort of your easy, you know, here's a thousand dollars. I'll get you my tax returns and just sort of not have to thi…”
Abouzeid: Unprofitable VC-fueled fintechs face painful couple of years
“If you grew really fast off the back of cheap venture debt and cheap venture equity and, It's unclear where the business goes from there. It's going to be a very painful couple of years ahead.”
Abouzeid: Ramp is a generational company, Rivet unlikely to match its success
“I hope I hope we are as successful as ramp one day. I don't think we will be, I think it's a generational company.”
Abouzeid: Aspiring founders should only leave jobs when an idea pulls them out
“Don't, if you just cut and run when you're sort of Marginally excited about an idea. Most people end up regretting it, at least that I've seen. So wait until the company, the idea, you know, the opportunity literally like rips you out of your seat, because in …”
Abouzeid: Ramp growth team targeted 2x their quarterly goal in expected value
“When you sum up all those expected weights, you end up with the value of all the experiments you're going to ship for the quarter. And it's very difficult to ship all of those and then miss your number, right? If you ship all of them and the sum of those weigh…”
Abouzeid: Single homepage button test drove over half of Ramp's quarterly goal
“Monday rolls around opening up our testing suite. Huh? There's a winning variant on the homepage by like a pretty big percentage. That's really interesting. It was big enough that it, you know, helped us hit our goals by like over half in like that one little …”
Abouzeid: Tax prep is highly fragmented and targeted by PE roll-ups
“This is a massively fragmented industry. It's largely owned by, you know, accountants themselves who started their own firms and grew it slowly over, you know, two decades and are ready to retire. Private equity firms are getting involved now to roll them up.”
Abouzeid: Rivet's Launch Means Nothing Until Successfully Completing Tax Season
“At the same time you know, nothing's happened yet. I'll take the congratulations on April 16th when tax season is over. Then I will feel like, you know, we've done what we need to do, but for the for the time being it feels good to sort of be able to talk abou…”
Abouzeid remains Superhuman's top referrer of new users
“I'm still their number one refer knock on wood. Nobody's overtaken me in the last year or so.”
Abouzeid: Rivet uses Drake Software for backend tax preparation
“We use Drake for our sort of backend sort of tax prep actually builds the returns.”
Abouzeid: ChatGPT generated the name for his startup Rivet
“Weirdly enough rivet was a name that Chad CPT told me.”
Abouzeid: Rivet services individual W-2 filers through Series C companies
“We work with, you know, everything from Vanilla w two tiny nines. I'm just an employee at a company. I want somebody to be able to call in the off season for questions all the way through call it like series B and series C companies with, you know, deeply soph…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Nick Abouzeid, Rivet: Growth "Hacking" Myths, What Worked at Ramp, & Better Tax Services · | Mar 22, 2024 | 30m |