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I sat down with René Lacerte, Founder and CEO of BILL, who’s built a $1.5 billion annual revenue company serving what he calls “the Fortune 5 million”, the SMBs that are the backbone of America. BILL processes over a trillion dollars annually for 500,000 customers and partners with 9,000 accounting firms. He has been building software for small businesses since 1999, first with PayCycle (acquired by Intuit for $170 million) and now with BILL since 2006.
He’s a contrarian who doesn’t believe in founder super-voting shares, thinks AI will free humans rather than replace them, and believes building to last always beats building to flip. In our conversation, he shared hard-won lessons from almost 30 years as founder and CEO. Why product-market fit requires leading customers to solutions they didn’t know they needed, how decisions made today echo five years into the future, and why building to last matters more than building to flip. We also discussed his father’s influence, a business leader and jazz pianist who taught himself to play with only six fingers, and how that shaped René’s understanding of excellence, grit, and human potential.
This is a masterclass in patient capital, intentional leadership, and serving a market most of Silicon Valley ignores.
Finding Product-Market Fit to Serve SMBs (The Fortune 5 Million)
René calls small businesses “the Fortune 5 million” because while everyone chases the Fortune 500, SMBs are the actual backbone of American communities. They create the jazz clubs in New York, the local coffee shops, the identity that makes neighborhoods distinct. Critically, they operate as families where people care about each other and their customers. He knows this first-hand. René grew up watching his parents and grandparents run multiple small businesses, and saw how these companies centered their communities around both their employees and the businesses they served. You can feel it’s truly personal for him and wants to protect the authenticity and freedom of expression of SMBs.
When René built the first BILL demo in 2006, customer #1 was his father. He showed a strong version of Bill.com’s MVP to his father, who had run half a dozen businesses over his lifetime. His dad had always been polite about René’s ideas before, offering measured “that’s interesting” responses. This time was markedly different. After the ten-minute demo, his father looked at him and said, “Holy shit. This is fucking amazing. This is everything I ever needed to run all the businesses I’ve ever done.” That moment confirmed René was onto something real.
Then came the harder test: convincing actual customers. The first 10 to 20 people he approached, many of them PayCycle customers who had trusted him in the past, all said they didn’t need it. They had ways to manage bills and receivables. René pushed them to try it anyway. Within 60 days, every single one came back saying it changed the game. They had no idea what they were missing. That’s the Henry Ford principle in action: if you’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not a car.
The way Rene think about it, is that the job of technologists is to understand pain points, see where technology is heading, and lead customers into new experiences that drive creativity they didn’t know was possible.
Building to Last vs. Building to Flip
René has a few contrarian views that put him at odds with much of Silicon Valley: For starters, he doesn’t believe founders should have Class A super-voting shares. He started BILL with 100% of the company and made every decision along the way: taking the first investor, hiring the first employee, giving away equity to build a bigger opportunity. Those were his choices, and he needs to be accountable for them. If he made those decisions incorrectly, investors need to be able to have their say. He doesn’t always like what investors have to say, but he is convinced that the accountability forces founders to have a healthy realism that’s essential for long-term success.
Additionally, René does not like to build for the short-term. After Jim Collins wrote “Built to Last,” René heard some VCs complaining that the problem with venture capital was that everyone was building to flip, not building to last. René disagreed then and disagrees now. When Intuit acquired René’s last company, PayCycle, they bought it precisely because it was built to last. The technology René’s team built in 1999 became the backbone of Intuit’s payroll platform and still powers millions of businesses today. That’s what matters. Everything leaders do, everything companies build, should be constructed for the future. The work should outlast the founder’s tenure, create compounding value, and serve customers decades from now.
Intentionality and Accountability in Leadership
The biggest lesson René took from his PayCycle days wasn’t about product or market strategy. It was about time horizons and accountability. When you’re running a company day to day, it’s easy to think about decisions in the present tense: this choice today, this person making that call, this feature we’re shipping next week. But René learned that as CEO, he would still be there five years later, absorbing the consequences of every decision made along the way.
Understanding that future accountability forces intentionality in the present is not about micromanaging or refusing to delegate. It’s about being present enough to ask: what will the ramifications of this decision be? Will I look back in five years and feel good about the choice we made at the time?
This doesn’t mean creating bureaucracy or slowing down decisions. It means being present as a leader, present as a father, present enough to smell the rose as you walk by it. René uses that metaphor deliberately. You can forget to appreciate the moment, consumed by everything you have to do, or you can stop and actually see what’s in front of you. The same applies to decisions. You can rush through them, or you can pause to consider their long-term impact.
At BILL, this shows up in how René coaches his team. When someone brings him a decision, he doesn’t write a different memo or demand a different process. He simply asks: is there anything about this that you would regret, or that you don’t fully understand? Let’s talk about that. That conversation, in the moment, creates the space for people to think beyond the immediate pressure and consider what they’ll be accountable for years from now.
The Power of Compounding
BILL’s revenue growth curve tells a story about patience and acceleration that;s hard to internalize for humans. It took BILL ~12 years to reach $100 million in annual revenue. Twelve years of grinding, building the network, iterating on product, earning trust with accounting firms and small businesses. Then the compounding kicked in. Four years after going public in 2019, BILL hit a billion dollars in revenue. Now they have reached 1.5 billion. The law of large numbers makes each subsequent doubling harder, but the trajectory reveals something that great founders understand at its core: the work you do in year one creates the foundation for year fifteen.
To get there, you have to understand that networks, trust, data, and market position compound in ways that aren’t visible early on. When BILL started, they had to convince customers one by one, often people René knew personally, to try the product. Those early adopters spread the word to their accountants. The accountants told other clients. The network began connecting buyers and suppliers, creating a two-sided marketplace that now includes 8 million entities. Each transaction generated data. Each workflow taught the system something new. Twenty years later, BILL has one of the best financial maps of the SMB economy in existence: over a billion documents processed, a trillion dollars in annual spend, multiple economic cycles observed. It’s hard to replicate that dataset or that institutional knowledge in three years, no matter how much capital you raise.
René’s advice to founders is simple: play the long game. The compounding doesn’t show up early, but you grind and hustle long enough you will see it.
Music, Creativity, and Excellence
Music plays a big role in René’s life. He grew up watching his father play piano, and it shaped how he thinks about excellence, grit, and human potential. René’s father was born with only six fingers. Nobody would teach him piano, so at age 16, he taught himself piano in one summer, practicing until his fingers bled. He became extraordinarily good, using the pedal creatively to let chords sustain while filling in melodies with the same hand. His creativity emerged from constraint, and his soul came through in every note.
For René, music (particularly jazz) is a palpable reminder of what we’re all capable of when passion meets persistence. He attended Stanford Jazz Camp as a teenager and got to play with the legendary Stan Getz. Getz gave him specific feedback about breathing and phrasing that René still carries into his public speaking today. But the deeper lesson was about proximity to greatness. René believes he feels closest to God, or spirituality, or whatever you want to call it, when he witnesses other people’s excellence. When you focus on your gifts, when you put in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, you become a version of yourself that’s almost transcendent… whether you’re a musician, a founder, or anyone committed to their craft.
Book Recommendations
René recommends two books:
“No Death, No Fear” by Thich Nhat Hanh. René was reading it when his father was dying, and it helped him understand and appreciate the circle of life. The book is meditative and teaches that we do not understand death, so there’s no reason to be afraid. You can apply that principle to many parts of life: if you don’t truly understand something, why fear it? René gives this book to people when someone meaningful to them has passed away.
2. “Who” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, which introduced him to the concept of job scorecards over traditional job descriptions. Instead of focusing on skills, scorecards define outcomes you expect in the first 90 days, six months, and first year. This creates better interview conversations and clearer alignment on what success actually means for a role.
The Unfiltered Q&A: René Lacerte on Building BILL
Miguel Armaza: Before we talk business, let’s talk about music. Why is music important for you both professionally and personally?
René Lacerte: At the highest level, I find music very meditative and relaxing. It’s one of the things I use to stay fresh. When I sit and listen to music, I really try to listen to the artists and enjoy the creative experience they intended. My dad was fairly talented as a jazz musician. He was born with a birth defect, so he had only six fingers, four on his left hand and two on his right. Nobody wanted to teach him piano. He learned trumpet originally, then at 16 asked his parents to buy him a piano. That summer, he taught himself to play. He would practice so much every day that his fingers would bleed, eight hours a day. He got really, really good. If I played you some of his music, you’d be like, how the hell does he play that with only six fingers?
Just seeing that and growing up with that, him being able to just express himself, is part of my attachment to music. It’s the creativity that sits inside of music, and using that as a way to relax, to meditate, to enjoy the presence of excellence. I feel closer to God when I see other people’s excellence. It’s a reminder of what we can all do when we focus on the gifts that we’ve been given. If you talk to any musician, they will quickly get to 60,000, 80,000, 100,000 hours of practice. When you focus with that persistence, that grit, and that love of what you do, you get pretty good at it. That closeness to how we’re intended to be is a reminder of what each of us can do every day.
Miguel Armaza: You’ve been building products for SMBs your entire career. Why is it really so hard to serve this market?
René Lacerte: Their mindshare is totally fragmented. When you start a company, you do everything. You have to do the accounting, the cleaning, the product, the sales, the people. You have to be comfortable switching back and forth between all these facets. That also means it’s hard to reach them because their mind is always going into different facets. They’re uniquely segmented in ways that make it very hard to reach them as a conglomerate. Consumers take up everything, enterprise is obvious because you just put salespeople on it, but SMBs are hard to reach.
For us, one of the things that was really important was acknowledging that I needed to have a multi-pronged distribution strategy. We went direct with keywords and demand generation. We go to accountants because accountants reach many other SMBs. We go through partnerships with financial institutions and recently announced NetSuite, Paychecks, and Acumatica. Then we go through our network. We have a two-sided B2B network of 8 million members. All of our customers pay or get paid through that network. The opportunity to reach SMBs means you have to be where they are. You have to acknowledge that they’re fragmented, that their brain is having to jump from task to task to task. You got to catch them when you can catch them, and that means being where they are.
Miguel Armaza: Going back to the early days of BILL, how did you find product-market fit?
René Lacerte: I was fortunate that I had been running a company and was in technology in the late 90s, early 2000s when I started PayCycle. I was seeing how all these things were changing, so I was able to see the opportunity that technology could bring to SMBs. The product-market fit started with me. We were doing the Demo God conference in 2007, so the company was a year old. I had prepared a demo and showed it to my dad at home. He had run half a dozen businesses in his life, and in prior conversations he’d always be like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” When I showed him this demo, at the end he said, “Holy shit. This is fucking amazing. This is everything I ever needed to actually run all the businesses I’ve ever done. I don’t know how you thought of it, but Godspeed.” I knew because my dad was an honest person. If somebody who’s done this much business can see the value in the first year of the demo, that’s going to be real.
Then we got to the next phase of actually getting customers. I went to all the people I knew. Many of them had been customers of PayCycle, so they knew we built good software. They were like, “I don’t need that. I’ve got a way to manage my bills, a way to manage my receivables.” I said, “Look, can you just try it?” Every one of them came back within 60 days saying that changed the game. They had no idea. This comes back to the Henry Ford statement: if you’d asked customers what they wanted, they would say a faster horse. They didn’t know they needed a car. Our job as technologists and software developers is to lead, to take that vision, understand the pain points, understand technology and where it’s going, and innovate in a way that drives customers into a new experience and new creativity for them. We’re all about making it simple to connect and do business. That’s been the mission since day one.
Miguel Armaza: What were the costly mistakes from PayCycle, and how did you apply them to BILL?
René Lacerte: One of the learnings at PayCycle was understanding accountability in the future. It’s very easy to say this decision today, I can make that or somebody else can make it. But who’s accountable for it five years from now? When you translate that accountability, ultimately that’s me. I’m going to have to be accountable because this is the company I started, and if I’m doing a good job, I’ll still be here. I’ll be the one that will have to absorb and take the glory or the criticism for any decisions that have been made in the past. Understanding that accountability into the future forces intentionality today.
Everything we do today, you have to be present. You have to understand that if I make this decision today, the impact in the future could be X, Y, and Z. At PayCycle, I just assumed I can let you make that decision and not think about the ramifications. My job is to see how all of it plays out. I take that intentionality very seriously today to make sure that as we’re making decisions, I will look back in the future and say we made the best decision at the time. Many of these decisions aren’t mine. This is me supporting my team to say, what about this in the future? Is that going to bring back something that you feel good about the decision at the time?
Miguel Armaza: Let’s talk about the power of compounding. It took you about 12 years to get to $100 million in revenue and six years to a billion, correct?
René Lacerte: Twelve years to about $100 million, and then four years from going public. We went public in 2019 and the trailing revenue was $100 million. Four years later it was a billion. In the last three years, we’ve doubled the revenue again. The growth now is the law of large numbers. When you’re a billion and a half plus in revenue, it’s harder to double, but the opportunity in the market’s massive, so we keep working at it.
What probably I miss most about the smaller days is knowing everybody in the company really well. When you’re small, somebody’s getting married, somebody’s having a baby, somebody’s family member passes, somebody’s gone on a great vacation. It creates a very strong, well-knitted community. I think we have very strong community at BILL today, but with 2,100 employees, it’s not possible for me to have that level of understanding of their lives. I’m a firm believer that if you want to work for a paycheck, go work anywhere. If you want to work for creative opportunities to impact the world, then come work at BILL. When you create those opportunities, you get people to do their best work and engage in ways that help customers much more than they would ever have imagined.
Miguel Armaza: You briefly talked about your AI strategy. For engineering, where do you fall on whether AI will replace humans or enhance them?
René Lacerte: Technology has always been about leveraging human capital. The example I often use is the wheel. That meant you could have a wheelbarrow, which meant one person could carry everything instead of five people. That created efficiency. What do the other people do? Maybe they started thinking about building a cart so now you can carry ten. It allowed people to be creative about what they could do next. That gave people time back to think about what else they could do.
When I think about AI, it is always about being an enabler of human creativity. We’re in this period where we don’t exactly know what work AI is going to do versus what work humans are going to do, but it doesn’t mean AI’s replacing humans. When I use AI for research, it gets a pretty good answer pretty quickly, but doesn’t get the final answer. That pretty good answer quickly gives me more time to really dive in about the final answer I want to understand. There are some tasks that are just manual, rote tasks that are the same every time. Financial operations is full of manual, rote tasks: collecting and entering bills, creating invoices and collecting on those invoices, collaborating with employees and the bank system to make payments. These are all tasks that don’t have creativity in them. We can automate those in a way that gives people back time to be creative about how they manage their business. That creativity might flourish into how they add new product lines. I think all humans actually like having impact, and AI is going to help with that and not actually hurt.
Miguel Armaza: Can you share one workflow you’ve been able to automate that significantly changed things for BILL?
René Lacerte: The most critical element for successful AI development is data. You have to have data to understand how your customers use it. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. We are experts on what SMB and mid-market companies need from a workflow perspective. We’ve built that into automation flows that require humans to be involved. We’re in a unique position to take those flows that we understand so intimately and automate them completely, make them autonomous. Going from automation to autonomy requires data, expertise, and trust, and we have those things in spades.
I’ll give you one example. We recently announced the W-9 agent. It sounds boring, but let me explain why it’s important. If you’re a business and you pay anybody above a certain size, you have to file a 1099. Filing a 1099 takes effort. You have to collect a W-9 from the supplier. Suppliers are busy. I already talked about how ADD businesses are doing so many things. Getting their attention is hard. We know from our customers that they spend a lot of time collecting W-9s so they can file the 1099. Nobody wants to do any of this. Nobody wants to touch it. They want it to be touchless. What we’re able to do now with our W-9 agent is have the agent go work with all suppliers and collect those W-9s and get them ready so that when you want to do the 1099, we do those automatically as well. You have a seamless experience. We get from something that nobody wants to touch to a touchless experience because of the agent. We’re eliminating workflows and friction that SMBs have, that mid-market companies have, that keep them from actually being their most creative self.
Miguel Armaza: I understand you’re a bit of a contrarian. There are things about Silicon Valley culture that you differ with?
René Lacerte: Jim Collins wrote “Built to Last,” and I was talking with some investors after it came out. They were saying the problem with the VC community is that we’re not building to last, we’re building to flip. I said, actually that’s not right. The reason Intuit bought PayCycle was because PayCycle was built to last. PayCycle became the backbone of Intuit’s payroll platform, and still to this day is a critical part of how they serve millions of businesses from a payroll perspective. That technology was built in 1999, so it was built to last. Everything we do should be built to last, everything we do as leaders, everything we do as a company needs to be built for the future, not just for the flip, not just for the money today.
Another way this shows up for me is I am against Class A shares. I do not think that anybody should have 10x voting rights. I started with 100% of the company. I made a decision to take the first investor, to hire the first employee. All those decisions all the way to today, I made the decision to give that stock away because I thought it would make the experience better for our customers and make a bigger business opportunity for the overall company. Those are decisions I need to live with. I need to be accountable for them. If I’ve made those decisions incorrectly in the future, investors need to be able to have their say. I don’t always like necessarily what investors are going to have to say, but it forces a realism that is super healthy. As a founder CEO, you get the chance to influence all the people around you, which already gives you a significant amount of influence. You got to build to last and be confident that you don’t need Class A shares to actually succeed and influence.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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