On why Waseem started an accounting startup:
Waseem: “Accounting is just the beginning for Pilot. I mean, our North Star has always been: ‘How do we find and eliminate pain?’… We started our first company, KSplice, to bring a new piece of technology into the world. We don’t really know anything about the business side, like dealing with accounting, legal, HR, etc., and it had been a very big and very visceral pain for us back then. So now, if we can be the sink for the boring but really important work and give founders back the time to actually focus on making their company successful, then we are, in some ways, driving innovation.”
On why engineers should consider working in ‘boring’ companies:
Waseem: “Dropbox is a file sync company. That sounds pretty boring. But there was a time when Dropbox was the ‘it’ company in Silicon Valley. Why is that? For one, I think they were working on hard technology problems. And two, there was a really amazing team in place. One of the things Pilot has going for it as a place to work is talent density. The mission of course matters, but what matters more than people think is if you enjoy working with your coworkers, if you have autonomy, if you have agency, if you have an impact. And that’s pretty domain independent.”
On how Pilot has changed due to LLMs:
Waseem: “There are a few buckets of applications for LLMs at Pilot. Category one is pieces of the process that are today done by a human—and done by a human always means done slowly and inaccurately—that could be done by a computer. What’s changed with the rise of LLMs is that the hardest 20% of work done by a human accountant, you actually get a huge lift by pointing an LLM at it. This is our main focus.”
Waseem: “Area of investment number two is generative AI-powered product features like a CFO chat bot that can tell me what’s happening in my books. We’ve spent no time here, and that’s because I’m not really convinced that’s what our users want. We have explicitly not invested in things that are cool but don't seem to add real business value for our customers.”
On the defensibility of AI start-ups in the face of AI advancements:
Waseem: “You have to think about the moat your company has. If the only aspect of your moat is you have something that can produce a capability similar to what you can get with GPT-4, you have a big problem because your secret sauce is available to everyone. If you have some structural advantage, like advantages on distribution or a brand, those things will help you. If a new company started today that had all of the code we'd written at Pilot, I wouldn't be happy about it, but there are also efforts we have made in the community and in the ecosystem that are not trivial to reproduce. I think the moat is the customer relationship and what the customer thinks about you. The power of that moat is probably a function of how good is the customer experience and how sticky the product is.”
On his advice to other founders as a successful 3x founder:
Waseem: "The goal of your company is not to raise investor dollars. I think that fundraising has achieved this interesting status in the minds of founders, where they associate their success with how much money the company has raised. But that is not winning. It just feels like it is because TechCrunch writes about you, and then you speak on panels, etc. Winning is when you build a lasting company, like Google or Microsoft, with a product that people want and are willing to give you money for."
Waseem Daher: @waseem
Ali Rohde: @RohdeAli
Josh Albrecht @joshalbrecht
