Pilot earned its customers’ trust by combining intelligent software with world-class accountants to deliver quality books at an affordable price. Pilot’s founders experienced this firsthand at their prior startups, and built Pilot to be the back-office solution they wished they’d had. Neither of these options provides the delightful, tech-first approach we’ve all come to expect from our vendors. Thus, most entrepreneurs face a choice: spend nights and weekends laboring over QuickBooks, or just outsource it. Bookkeeping is a must-have for every company, but while large companies have teams of accountants, small companies do not. Pilot offers bookkeeping, tax and CFO services, but what it really solves is the perennial problems of too many questions and too little time. We fell in love with the team, and we fell in love with their dream of making the back office painless for every small and mid-sized business. And thus, when the pandemic hit and the rest of the industry went reeling, Pilot emerged as the clear leader in tech-enabled bookkeeping. Even pre-COVID, the team had not set out to maximize growth, but to maximize customer success. ![]() But it was not just their technical prowess that caught our attention - it was their commitment to doing the right thing for the long term. In CEO Waseem’s words, “at MIT, we weren’t just computer science people, we were computer club people - so, the nerdiest of the nerds.” CTO Jessica is a world-renowned open-source developer, and COO Jeff is an elite computer scientist even by elite standards. As we spent more time with the founders, we came to realize just how exceptional they truly are. Fortunately, we stayed in touch.įast forward to 2020. Unfortunately, we failed in our mission, and Waseem, Jeff and Jessica left to start Pilot. We intersected with them more directly in 2016 when our partner Bryan was deployed to help persuade them to stay at Dropbox, which had joined forces with their second company, Zulip. We first heard of Pilot’s founders, Waseem, Jeff and Jessica, one decade and two companies ago, when they were fresh out of MIT and working on their first company, Ksplice (which they sold to Oracle). After the monthly check is complete, the company receives an email of their books, along with notes from the finance expert.Pilot co-founders: Jeff Arnold, Waseem Daher, & Jessica McKellarīy Pat Grady and Michelle Bailhe on behalf of Team Sequoia The first level of checks is done on completed books by Reviewbot software which flags anything that looks questionable so that experts can easily analyze it. The collected information is used to build a unique checklist for closing the company’s book which is easily accessible in their systems and always up to date.Įach month, the business’s books are checked through a rigorous 14-step checklist, which includes both manual tasks by Pilot’s team members and automated tasks by their software. Initially, the expert will interview business owners to learn everything about their company, its operations, objectives, and special issues that one needs to be mindful of for accurate bookkeeping. This software automates detailed, error-prone manual tasks making it easier for experts to analyze them and make decisions accordingly. Upon signing up with Pilot, businesses are appointed financial experts to manage their books with the help of advanced software. These employees interact with companies to collect their data, use internal tech tools to organize it, and then structure it to produce a set of accurate books. ![]() It mostly employs former accountants who are assigned to work directly with small businesses for administrative tasks such as bills, bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes. Pilot provides financial back-office services to small businesses and startups by combining intelligent software with world-class accountants.
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