Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the Ice House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over or 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the Ice House, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Stop me when this sounds familiar. An entrepreneur with a proven track record in FinTech sees an opportunity to disrupt centuries old business practices. It's in an increasingly digital world, trillions of dollars of transactions remain tied to paper records, some depending on ledgers identical to those found in the New York Stock Exchange archives dating back to the 1700s. So, our guest starts a company that provides technological solutions and infrastructure that resides in global information networks. The result is efficiency, portability and improve transparency to how cash is moving in and out of its client's coffers.
Josh King:
The company's early impressive growth is further cultivated by partnering with traditional banks and other financial institutions to speed up adaptation and help transform an industry. Joining us inside the Ice House today to explain how Bill.com is bringing automation to complex back office operations is Rene Lacerte. He's been here at the New York Stock Exchange all day following this morning's successful IPO. Our conversation with Rene Lacerte on how Bill.com is transforming businesses large and small through its end to end cloud-based software platform and how to cultivate intergenerational entrepreneurs. That's right after this.
Speaker 3:
And now a word from John Berger, president and CEO of Sunnova; N-Y-S-E ticker N-O-V-A.
John Berger:
Were a solar company. We're out there to bring solar to every home in the country. We have such a vast market that remains untapped. I think it's less than 3% of the market of homes in the United States, and so there's just so much potential. New York Stock Exchange is the home of capitalism. It's just where the action happens no matter where you are in the world. All eyes are on the New York Stock Exchange. Sunnova, now listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 3:
This episode was recorded on December 12th, 2019.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Rene Lacerte, is the CEO of Bill.com. A company he founded in 2006 to simplify payments for businesses. Prior to bill.com, Rene founded PayCycle, the first and largest online payroll solution, which was acquired by Intuit in 2009. Earlier in his career, he spent five years at Intuit growing its bill payment and credit card businesses and launching Inuit's first connected payroll product. Rene was a E&Y entrepreneur of the year national finalist and the Northern California winner in 2017. For seven years in a row, he's been named as one of the 100 most influential people in the accounting industry by Accounting Today. Welcome inside the Ice House and to the New York Stock Exchange.
Rene Lacerte:
Thank you very much. Great to be here.
Josh King:
We're recording this episode on the day, Rene, that Bill.com listed under the ticker symbol, BILL. You've opened up the market for trading this morning from the bell podium in front of 150 of your employees, investors, advisors and guests. How was that experience?
Rene Lacerte:
It's a dream come true. In many ways, it's surreal when you are an entrepreneur. One of the things that motivates you to start something is to give back, to actually change the world, make it a little bit better with your idea. And so to have an idea, and then to work on it for 13 years and to be able to work with employees and work with customers and partners, and then to get to the public markets where the scrutiny on the idea, the scrutiny on the management team, the scrutiny on what you've built is just at a different level. And to have that market look at us and say, you know what? The market's real. This is a real company that has great management, that has great capabilities. It's surreal. Everybody wants that when you start something; wants an acknowledgement to know that the idea was a good idea, right? So.
Josh King:
Did you sleep soundly in your bed last night or toss and turn?
Rene Lacerte:
I was going to sleep very well, because I was exceptionally tired, but then we had a little get together and some employees suggested, are you going to be able to sleep tonight? And I hadn't thought that was an option, not sleeping. But once they suggested it, the idea wouldn't leave my head. So I did not sleep well, but I'm sure I will tonight.
Josh King:
How's the roadshow?
Rene Lacerte:
The roadshow was a phenomenal experience. I had plenty of great advice from people that I know that have gone public before. And the advice was like, and in general, my experience was take the learn you can every day. And so I knew this was going to be an exceptionally challenging opportunity, but also an exceptionally rewarding opportunity because I would just be able to learn. And so the public market investors, they are critical. They have a really hard lens that they focus on and the questions they ask are much different than what I've had before. And so just preparing to understand how to communicate what was unique about our business was really important, and I just learned a ton.
Rene Lacerte:
So, for me, I thought it was invigorating. It gave me a lot of excitement about what capabilities the company has and the opportunities we have. And just getting to know that these really thoughtful leaders in the investment community are behind the company that's exciting.
Josh King:
Getting to the other side, I've talked to a lot of CEOs, CFOs on their listing day, and their view is fairly similar, which is a lot of people put a lot of stock literally in this day. There's a lot of excitement on the floor, but tomorrow you're back to work.
Rene Lacerte:
Totally. So I've been working today a few. I've been busy on the interviews, but I've had a few moments where I've had to take care of a few things, right? And so the other side is really, how do you think about the growth opportunities for the business? And so for me, what I'm excited about is just using the awareness potential, obviously, that we have, the capital that we now have, the long term permanent capital investors that come with that, and using that to go after the millions of businesses out there.
Josh King:
So, how did your experience with PayCycle inform how you started and grew Bill.com?
Rene Lacerte:
At the core, the whole idea came from managing and running PayCycle. So I'm a fourth generation entrepreneur. All of my ancestors, my parents, grandparents and great-grandfather, serial entrepreneurs. So when I started my first company, one of the things that I thought was important to do was to manage cash. And so PayCycle was the first internet payroll company. And the thing I'd learned at the dinner table, what I affectionately called the dinner table MBA, is that cash is king.
Rene Lacerte:
You got to stretch out the payables and pull in the receivables. And so when I was running PayCycle, the opportunity for me to do that was actually really hard. And I was trying to do, I was trying to decide which vendors not to pay, which customers to collect from. And none of the tools that I had built or looked at when I was at Intuit, none of those worked. And so I just started thinking about, why am I not using these electronic payment op tools that are out there? Whether it was consumerable payment or whatnot.
Rene Lacerte:
And what it dawned on me was that businesses have a lot more complexity in their payment process, and that they use the check; the paper check as a control mechanism to slow things down because nobody had automated the processes leading up to the check. And I realized at the same time that the... at the time, we called it the internet, now we call it the cloud. The internet was not nearly as powerful as the cloud. The cloud is a central database with a central UI capability with an infinite number of different interfaces to that database. That allowed me to think about all the different processes that needed to happen and all the different UIs that needed to happen that you could automate.
Rene Lacerte:
And so we were able to build that platform; the platform first mentality of really automating all the financial operations. And so it was PayCycle where I was actually doing the day to day, like my parents, like my grandfather did in his first business, walking around, talking to employees, hoping they're there and writing checks and putting stuff in filing cabinets and not finding stuff. That whole mess, it hadn't changed in 60 years. I'm like it's time and I know how to do it because I was already in the technology arena.
Josh King:
Persistence, Rene, is a word that you often use to describe how to succeed as an entrepreneur. I want to listen to a short clip and hear how your father exemplified that trait. My friend, the New York Times reporter, Mark Leibowitz, immediately recognized that tune because it's a tune that we listen to a lot growing up; Chuck Mangione's performing Feel So Good, a song that your father taught himself to play. What did he teach you about the value of effort?
Rene Lacerte:
So it's, and I'll try not to get emotional. My dad's with me. Now I'm going to segue here for you, but this is a pen that my mom got my dad when they first were doing well. This is a ring that my grandmother got my grandfather when they were first doing well. And I don't wear a ring daily, but today. This is a watch that my mom's father got from his employees and I got a picture of my grandmother's in my pocket. But anyways, so for me, family means everything, right? And I grew up with my dad playing the piano all the time.
Rene Lacerte:
He's an amazing piano player. And I took it for granted. He had four fingers on his left hand and two fingers on his right. And he was born that way. And he wanted to play piano when he was younger and he was able to take a few lessons, but pretty quickly the teacher was like, I can't teach him anything because everything's written for classical and you need 10 fingers. So, put that away for 10 years or maybe seven years, whatever, and he played trumpet. But then at 16, he said to his parents and they supported him. He said, look, I just want to play piano. So they bought him a baby grand piano and he taught himself on one summer.
Rene Lacerte:
And he a was phenomenal jazz pianist. And his music inspires me. And if you work in the company, you get to hear his music from time to time. But that song, what was amazing for me about the persistence. So I knew the persistence from him playing the piano just because you grow up, you take it for granted, but if you've studied his fingers, like how does he do that? And how he did that in one summer? Like he just, he had blood and he just played six, eight hours a day and just he wanted to learn and he taught himself and create his own style.
Rene Lacerte:
So when that song came out, he loved it. He went down to the music shop, he bought a flugelhorn. I had never heard my dad play trumpet. And he was... I was 10 years old and he was really great. That night, he played it and it sounded as great as Chuck Mangione. It wasn't he had to teach himself actually, it was his skill was so... because he'd done so much persistence as a kid. He played hours and hours a day on the trumpet before he switched to the piano. He was able just to get up and play. And so that just taught me that you can never say, no, you just do. Right. Life is about doing. He never liked excuses. There was no excuse that you were ever allowed to have. It's just go fricking do it. This is your life, make it happen. So, and that's what he did. And that's what that story is for me.
Josh King:
What was actually going on either physiologically or psychologically, like listening to that arrangement and saying, I can... Was it mimicry or repetition?
Rene Lacerte:
I think for him, he had a pretty good ear. I might say he had perfect pitch. And so I think for him, it was like, that's the most beautiful trumpet song I've heard in 10 years and I want to see if I can play it. And I want to just remind him how beautiful the trumpet was. And he liked the piano because he wanted to write music and he wrote a lot of beautiful music. And I think it was just hearing that, that reminded him that, you know what, it's a beautiful instrument and I want to play it. And so to me it's like there's no excuses. If you want do it, just go do it.
Rene Lacerte:
Now, he had a talent that he sounded great that day, but it taught me that don't ever make excuses. If there's something you want to do, go do it and take the time you need to do it. So that's the persistence of teaching yourself to play piano or the number of businesses he started. He invented computers, got rid of punch cards. He invented the first... Started the first online payroll company in the eighties before we had the internet. It was all modem based. Right. So he just did it. Like, no excuses.
Josh King:
The Lacerte household; your parents founded five companies two less than the seven that your grandparents started. Give me a flavor. You just said two of them, but what's going on with this family, Rene?
Rene Lacerte:
That's one of the things for me that's surreal about the day and maybe I'm making a little bit more of this moment, but I think anybody, and I think most people don't have to go too far back to be an immigrant. And so on my dad's side, the Lacerte name, they came over in 1670. And that was obviously a hard time to travel and all that. To Canada; French Canada. Right. And so I just feel like the risk taking, the persistence on making it happen in life, those roots are there. Right? And so for me, hearing about my great-grandfather had two general stores, my grandfather he was a consummate businessman.
Rene Lacerte:
It didn't really matter what he wanted to do. He could just do it. So he had farming, had general stores, he had car dealerships, he had data processing. He had all sorts of companies. My dad was a technologist. He liked being creating around finance like I do. And so growing up around that, what you learn is that if you have dreams, go make them happen. Right? And be creative, and don't take no for an answer. Go figure out how to make it happen.
Josh King:
So the company name you and I were talking about, the role that David Hornik played as a investing partner for you and with you, it was not originally Bill.com, it was called Cash View until Salesforce’s CEO stepped in. At the time you said a name is only a name, but when you can tie it to what you do, it makes sense. What did Mark Benioff approach you with? And does it still make sense?
Rene Lacerte:
Totally makes sense. And Mark, so our first couple of engineers came out of Salesforce and our CTO, Eric knew Mark well. And so when he realized that Eric had left, he stayed in touch. And at one point he asked Eric, well, what are you doing? And so Eric told him what we were doing. He was like, hey, I've got this great URL, maybe Rene would want to meet and we could talk about it. So we got together and we talked about it. And the decision for me really rested on the fact that from a accounting perspective, one person's debit is another person's credit. So payables and receivables are two sides of the same coin. So I give you a bill and I expect you to pay me. So that's good for me.
Rene Lacerte:
You get a bill for me and now you have to take money out of your pocket to pay me. So it's the exact opposite, but the two sides are the same coin. And so for me, when that aha came up, I'm like, that makes total sense. So we worked out the deal and was very grateful for that. And think it's a perfect name for the company, given 81,000 customers, 1.8 million in our network, they use us to pay and get paid. Everybody gets introduced to the simplest, fastest way to get paid if you're a business or to pay.
Josh King:
So help me define exactly the kind of business that Bill.com is best for. Is there a type or company profile that you cater to?
Rene Lacerte:
So our focus and target is the small, midsize businesses. So the SMB for us is less than 100 million small businesses and revenue. Small businesses to us are less than 10 million, midsize companies are 10 to 100. So there's only 20,000 businesses in the US that are more than 100 million in revenue. And so the approach that we take is a broad, horizontal approach that can simplify all the financial operations that a business has around their payables or their receivables. And our opportunity is really just to get rid of that paper back office. And so we've seen that customers of all sizes in all industries, in those target segments, I just said, really get a lot of value out of the product.
Josh King:
So digitization speeds up the transactions, which is important for a company needing to maintain liquidity. But what are some of the other benefits from unshackling the back office from these file cabinets and storing all the paper that we've been talking about?
Rene Lacerte:
So I think one of the really challenging things in running a business, and this is what I felt when I was running a pay cycle, if you have the adage, which every entrepreneur I think has in their head is that cash is king. And one of the things we do in this country, and I think across the world is people don't always pay when they're asked to pay, right? They're waiting for the service to be at a certain level. Now you want to do that at a restaurant that you might change the tip, or if you're unhappy, maybe we send something back. But when you're an SMB and you have all these different services, people work on that. And so what makes that hard is all the process that goes into checking into whether you should be pay that bill or not, or whether you should invoice that customer, and you just need data.
Rene Lacerte:
So the way I think about it is you don't make decisions about who you're not going to pay today or who you're going to collect from today without information, and you can't keep it in your head. So that information in a manual system would be sticky notes and filing cabinets and people around the office and reconciliation information. And so what we were able to do is put all that in your phone. So you can ask those questions of yourself and of your team from anywhere in the world. And that makes a difference. It means you're free to do business how you want to do business and you make better decisions. If you have the information, then you can make better decisions. And I felt that I wasn't making the best decisions when I was running the first company, because I didn't have the information at my fingertips.
Josh King:
My company is one of those small companies that makes about $10 million in revenue. How much does Bill.com cost me?
Rene Lacerte:
Our average customers’ probably paying us around $1,000 a year to $15 a year, depends on the number of transactions, the number of users they want to have. You can get started for as low as 40 bucks a month.
Josh King:
We recently had on this podcast, the chief information security officer of our own parent company, Intercontinental Exchange. Much of the conversation that I had with Jerry was around the importance of cyber security and risk management in today's world. How does Bill.com provide that to its clients?
Rene Lacerte:
So sometimes when I'm at conference, I'll ask the question. So anybody want to shout out your bank account and routing information? And no, and actually you have no reason not to trust me personally. Right? And actually a lot of times and in a place with people that they have every reason to trust everybody in the room and nobody will do that. And I said, well then how come businesses 90% of the time rely on paper checks? Because the check has all that information. So how do we help them get rid of that? That's the first thing. And so we do a lot of things helping get rid of that. Their bank account's not known to anybody but the signer. What happens on the payments is we manage those payments so that nobody ever knows the bank account. That's pretty cool.
Rene Lacerte:
We manage all the exceptions and returns. That's pretty cool. So that's one way that we manage the risk. We have a number of things that we do from our platform to make sure that our customers are safe. And one of the nice things about having a platform with 81,000 customers and 1.8 million network members and 45 million documents a month, if you will, one thing about having all of that is you get more data. And data allows you to help ensure the success and accuracy for your customers and the safety for your customers. And that helps us build trust for our customers, and it's really important.
Josh King:
Talking about trust, it's important to all companies, but particularly those handling other people's money. Is there a secret to gaining trust or is it just going to be slowly built over time?
Rene Lacerte:
Definitely, the secret is doing it well. Right? And the secret is understanding the requirements. So we're licensed in all 50 states, we've gone to the states, we've spent five years doing it. We've done all the work and that matters because those states are coming in and doing audits and making sure that we're. So the secret is understanding the regulatory environment, understanding the risk and how money moves, understanding the data that's coming in and then creating the platform unless you actually escalate those transactions that might be risky. And so I think the secret is just hard work, back to your question about persistence. You just have to keep going at it and always be relentless. You're never done.
Josh King:
I think of an image that I might have of some of your grandparents or parents companies and the people writing the checks have the green eye shades and the ledger books and they peeled them off and their writing checks. The retail economy is increasingly being conducted on a digital platform, such as Airbnb or Uber or Seamless or Chewy. I was surprised to find out Rene, that three quarters of payments are still checks, a number even higher for these small businesses. Why is that?
Rene Lacerte:
So I think it really goes back and this was the aha for me when I was running a pay cycle, the check was my stop measure. It allowed me to slow down everything in the business and the way, so I can read a P and L, anybody can read a P and L, right? Reading a P and L doesn't tell you where to go invest. The same way that if I ask you, you just hired this person to do this work. Did you get the return you wanted? Is there another opportunity to double down there? That customer, were they happy? Why can't we do something else for them, because I like happy customers. If they're not happy, then what do we need to do to go fix? That all happens in the payables and the receivables process. And that's a manual process because the paper allows that conversation.
Rene Lacerte:
So if you can build a platform that has collaboration built into it, then you get to automate that. So the collaboration has to include the documents and it has to include the people. Those people can be employees, they can be accountants, they can be suppliers, they can be clients, but you have to be able to create that collaboration across all of that. And that's what has enabled our success, is that we have that at collaboration, we integrate with all of their systems, their banking and accounting systems, and we do it in a way that they get up and running in less than 15 minutes. And we don't charge them the first 30 days, it's a risk free trial. They're not happy, they don't pay. That's our confidence in our platform. That's the confidence that we have in our customers. And that's something that we think is really important is that you got to make a difference quickly.
Josh King:
Digitizing the back office. I think I saw you answer a question similar to this on CNBC, and certainly it's been part of your road show, but what is the size of this prize that we're talking about?
Rene Lacerte:
So there's 81,000 customers on our platform today. There's 6 million businesses in the US with less than 100 million in revenue. And the opportunity is helping all of those move on to financial operations in the cloud. And so it's trillions of dollars in payments. It's I think billions of dollars of opportunity in revenue over time. And that's the opportunity that we're talking about.
Josh King:
Talking about the growth potential of the company, I watched your appearance on Emergence Capital's emergence playbook from a couple years ago. At the time you spoke about the importance of following your gut when building a team, but what else are you looking for besides butterflies in your stomach as you position the company for today's listing and building that team?
Rene Lacerte:
I think the execution rigor that's required of being a public company requires a discipline and experience that folks need to have, right? The gut part really goes back to, do they fit the culture? Do they really understand what type of environment we're trying to create for employees? And that's super important. And obviously for me, that's probably the most important thing to get right. The execution is, I wouldn't say the second most important, is also the most important thing. Those two things go hand in hand, you have to be able to have people that know how to do their job and take it to the next level. And so as you move to being a public company, that next level, that bar just jumped significantly. And so having people on our team that can help all of us learn and grow, that's super important. And that's something that we work hard to do, so.
Josh King:
As of today, you are a public company, but is Bill.com still small enough for homemade granola in the break room?
Rene Lacerte:
It is right now. So yeah. Yeah. So my wife still makes a granola for us at home, so.
Josh King:
What's the output of her kitchen?
Rene Lacerte:
We have about 500 employees in the Palo Alto offices and depending on how many people are eating it that week, yeah, she can make enough to keep up for four to five days, so.
Josh King:
You also talked about using a scorecard instead of a job description when hiring talent. How does a scorecard work and is that still your main metric?
Rene Lacerte:
It is. Yeah. So the scorecard concept comes from a book called Who, and I'm forgetting the author right now, but Who is a wonderful book. And it talks about the driver of any hiring decision needs to be that you're clear on the expectations for that position in that job. And so if I'm not clear on the expectations of what I want the person to do, how is it possible the person that's interviewing for the job could ever deliver on my expectations? Because they don't even know what my expectations are. So the focus of a scorecard is to say, what do you think the person's going to be capable of doing for the company in 90 days, in 120 days, in 180 days, in the year? And to be very specific, you can't just say, they need to know the company. Maybe that's the first two weeks, right?
Rene Lacerte:
You need to have a specific goal to say they will impact performance in this way on this program, by this timeframe. And what that does is it changes the conversation with the employee. You have some candice that just won't even apply. You're like, well, that's not a job I'd be interested in, or I don't think I can deliver on. But then it changes the interview into, so tell me why you think that's something that you can do. It's more of a give and take, it's like, I don't want to say that my style of interviewing was ever pointed, but that's the approach. I want to have the scorecard. I want people to self-select in, and then I will ask questions and I'll make sure when I go back to talk about it with the employees, the others that are on the hiring team, do we think the person's capable of delivering that? And that sets up a really good opportunity for success for both company and the employee.
Josh King:
After the break, Rene Lacerte and I discuss how Bill.com is partnering with the biggest names in banking and accounting to better serve clients. We'll be right back after this.
Speaker 6:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Rene Lacerte, CEO and founder of Bill.com and I were discussing the foundering of Bill.com and the company's successful IPO. Bill.com is a cutting edge technology company. How is Bill.com using artificial intelligence and other machine learning technologies to simplify all these back office processes that we've been talking about?
Rene Lacerte:
The AI capabilities that we have are built off of really the massive data that we have from our customers. So those 81,000 customers manage on an annual basis, 45 million documents, millions of payments every month, those opportunities, $71 billion in the last fiscal year of money moved. That data creates opportunities for us to understand how to help them better. And so the AI that we first launched, Productize, I should say, as a product called the intelligent virtual assistant, we rolled that out last spring, and that takes the data from the documents, all those documents we have that have been entered by our customers and allows us to, going forward, automatically enter the information for the bills that come in. So we can automatically prepopulate the vendor name, the invoice number, the invoice date, the invoice amount.
Rene Lacerte:
If you've used us for paying that vendor before, we can now route the approval within the company and sync it with the accounting software, without you doing anything. You just take a picture of the bill or you send it in via an email or a scan, and we just saved you a ton of time and you're off to making your business better. That's what's exciting. And there's so many more things like that AI will do because of the technology and the data that we have on top of the platform.
Josh King:
The intelligent virtual assistant, is it easy for a mom and pop shop to transition to it this fully digital system from what could be generations of file cabinets in the basement?
Rene Lacerte:
Yeah, it's super easy. It's less than 15 minutes. We designed our programs. Like I said, you get up and running in first 30 days and it's risk free. You don't have to pay us. And so everybody, customer, our sales team, our marketing team, is focused on getting people up and running. And so it's more about do they take the time, which we think can be as little as 15 minutes to get set up? Which isn't a lot of time if you're going to start saving 50% of the time it takes you to manage a back office. So it's just an opportunity for us to continue to really make a difference for what folks are doing.
Josh King:
As folks are listening to this podcast and they're running a small business, and they're intrigued by what they're hearing, what are the questions they should be asking themselves about whether they're ready or not for Bill.com?
Rene Lacerte:
I think the main question is, could I do something better with my time? Do I feel like I have all the answers to all my questions, all the time? If I had an audit, would I feel comfortable with all the information being easily accessible? Do I feel like I need a little bit better working capital, more information to be able to make that working capital happen? The cheapest form of working capital is stretching out your payables and pulling your receivables. So I think as questions like that, it's asking what could be better about your operation. And if you think anything can be better then hopefully you'll come to us and we'll help you.
Josh King:
First thing I noticed when I went to your website was the names of the accounting software companies that Bill.com works with. Where does Bill.com sit in the ecosystem of banks, accounting firms, and businesses?
Rene Lacerte:
When I decided to go after the SMB market, I knew that SMBs were everywhere. There are millions of them, and that reaching them would require multiple diverse distribution strategies. So the first would be direct, which we do, but then I also knew that businesses sometimes need a nudge from people they trust. So businesses, SMBs trust accountants, and what we're able to do there is have partnership with ASCPA and CPA.com, and that allows us to get the accounting firm, to then bring their clients on the platform to help them manage the back offs and be a strategic advisor.
Rene Lacerte:
Accounting software providers are trusted by SMBs because that's the platform they use for their general ledger. And so we partner with them to integrate the data and some of those integrations have gone so well that the app store integrations have driven interests for deeper partnerships. So the partnership with Intuit is a important partnership for us. The third type of company that SMBs trust is their financial institution.
Rene Lacerte:
Obviously we have payments and that's a core part of what we do. So we have four of the top 10 and they trust us to reinvent payments for their business clients. So there's something about entrepreneurship that I think is interesting that sometimes gets overlooked. It's a sacred trust. There's a trust between me and the employees. There's a trust between me, our company, and our customers. And there's a trust between our company and the investors. And then there's a trust between our company and our partners. And that trust is so important. And to be at the center of that ecosystem, that where people trust each other, it's actually a real fun part of the job to know that that matters and that it can make a difference.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, we are recording this episode on the same day as Bill.com’s IPO, an event that we always say is the start, not the end of a journey, but do you have plans to catch up with mom and dad by, I don't know, starting three or four more businesses? What's next for you?
Rene Lacerte:
I think for me, this one has some amazing legs in front of it. The opportunity is so big and I'm loving what I'm doing and I'm growing as a person and I'm just going to keep doing my best to help SMBs across the country with our platform.
Josh King:
Our listeners will be hearing this episode about 60 days after Bill.com, IPO-ed, what do you hope will have happened during the time that you and I are sitting here today and what's next for Bill.com in the next year and beyond? What's the plan for 2020?
Rene Lacerte:
Well, we have a significant opportunity in front of us, which we've talked about, and there's a lot of initiatives that we're working on across the company, whether it's marketing and sales or product or engineering, there's lots of things that we're doing. And so I believe that in 60 days, we'll continue to understand more about how to reach those millions of businesses and how to do that with product and how to do that with marketing sales. And so, I stay focused on what I know to control and we will, as a team, get reinvigorated, if you will, to really deliver this for the SMBs. It's a privilege to be able to serve customers the way we get to serve them and to be in a position to have the permanent capital behind us, gives us the confidence to go make the right term decisions for the long term.
Josh King:
I look forward to hearing you in your first earnings call.
Rene Lacerte:
Okay. Thank you.
Josh King:
Thanks so much for joining us inside the ISS.
Rene Lacerte:
Thank you.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Rene Lacerte, CEO and founder of Bill.com. If you like, what you heard, please rate us on iTunes. So other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Kearney Ferguson and Pete Asch, with production assistance from Steven Romanchick and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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