Summary Bezos and his rich friends invest a lot of money in a company which provides bookkeeping and accounting services to small and medium sized businesses.
Our Take Quite often accurate bookkeeping and accounting is forgotten or dismissed by small online business owners. It’s very important but not very interesting and requires a whole skill set that most entrepreneurs do not possess. In fact Amazon businesses are usually a total mystery to CPA’s too. If you are successful however, getting your company accounts running smoothly and accurately is critical to ongoing success and if you have ambitions to sell your business and move to the beach - you’d better make sure all the boring stuff has been done right. Having created the infrastructure which allowed thousands of new businesses to come into existence (more than 50% of Amazon’s revenue is from 3rd Party Sellers), it’s no surprise that Bezos now has his eye on making more money from sellers as they realize they need to get their accounting in order. If you lay awake at night worrying about this stuff, just reach out and contact us. We’ll be happy to talk you through our Accounting and Bookkeeping Service to help you sleep more peacefully.
Here’s the text from the original article which appeared on CNBC on March 26th 2021. The articles author was Kate Rooney.
Accounting start-up Pilot raised a new round of funding from Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley investors to help small businesses outsource back-office tasks.
The San Francisco-based company closed a $100 million funding round this week, doubling its valuation to $1.2 billion. The round was led by Bezos’s venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions and hedge fund Whale Rock Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Index Ventures. Stripe and its founders, Patrick and John Collison, as well as former VMware CEO Diane Greene had previously invested in Pilot.
Its co-founder and CEO Waseem Daher interned at Amazon 16 years ago before starting two other companies. One was bought by Oracle, the other by Dropbox. He likened Pilot’s use case to a problem solved by Amazon Web Services: Let developers focus on building a business instead of figuring out how to host a website.
“There’s all of this annoying, tedious, scary and important back-office stuff that you need to do as a small business owner,” Daher told CNBC. “Owners should focus on running a company at scale, and Pilot should be doing the back office stuff for you.”
Pilot’s employees — mostly former accountants — are assigned to work directly with a small business. They take on administrative tasks like payroll, bookkeeping, taxes and bills. The start-up has partnered with companies including American Express, Bill.com, Gusto and Stripe. Daher describes it as “tech-enabled,” but Pilot itself is not a software company. The company makes money from subscription fees.
Pilot’s revenue roughly doubled up during the pandemic despite small businesses bearing the brunt of Covid-related shutdowns. The company’s revenue has roughly tripled every year since it was founded in 2017, Daher said.
He attributed recent growth to awareness of automation as people run their companies from home. More millennials are also starting small businesses and tend to be more open to outsourcing through a tech platform, Daher said.
“People want to do this virtually. They don’t want to have to go down to Main Street with their box of receipts and visit their accountant’s office,” he said.
Pilot is Daher’s third company with co-founders Jeff Arnold, Pilot’s COO, and Jessica McKellar, the company’s CTO. The group met as undergraduates at MIT in the computer club.
Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg, an early investor in Pilot, first met the group of founders at Dropbox nearly a decade ago. While the narrative in Silicon Valley right now is “focused on using software to optimize for everything,” Goldberg said Pilot is taking the “opposite approach” by adding people back in the mix.
“Nobody starts a company to deal with BS in the back office. You want someone to extract that pain point,” Goldberg said. “People don’t want software, they want peace of mind.”
Here’s the link to the original article:
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