JustPaid: AI Financial Controller, Billing Automation & Startup Growth | Deconstructed VC

some of the larger companies don't change I feel like there's a lot of bad products out there scared that they're going to break something and everybody's struggling and we understand that it's very hard everybody rejects you people don't I work for you investors don't want to invest clients don't want to buy your stuff landlords though I Lees you in office what do you do there's these like secret meetups you go to Just p and it gives you the answers welcome to deconstructed VC that's a YouTube show where we are going to deconstruct maybe even dissect businesses and try to show which building blocks they're made up this is our first episode and welcome just bait team we have an Anelya, Daniel, and Vinay who are the co-founds of this amazing Service which are brave enough to let me do this interview together with my wife Marina the first question is what is just be so jate is a money Movement platform that allows businesses to essentially understand like when a contract is signed to upload that contract you can literally understand like what's happening in your business when you're paying a bill or when you're receiving Revenue oh so both ways both ways we're more focused on the receiving of Revenue people want to get paid but we also have the pay ins as well so is this like a virtual Financial controller yeah I would say it's a virtual Financial controller because it's technically doing all the manual work or manual entry what clerk accounting clerk or accountant used to do like taking do screens and looking side by side and we are using AI to automate that entire whole process so what a accountant or a controller has to do is just review

like looking at all the data and make sure that is exactly what it intended to be and then do the process so more or less like an assistant to a financial controller so you're not replacing actual Financial controls well we cannot replace their whole brain but we can replace their manual entry process how does this feel to to automate people out of their jobs we're not automating people out of jobs we're just making them more efficient so instead of having accounts payable department accounts receivable department and managers of those departments you can have it you know can have a bit more effective team and you can be preserving Capital instead of on operations you can focus on development you can spend it elsewhere where it's way more effective for your businesses so so what does it consist of like so you're saying that that it takes care of your Revenue it takes care of stuff that you pay how does it work can you break it down like on an example well I can take the can receivables part and explain so when a sales sales rep closes the deal we upload their contract right inside their Salesforce HubSpot what CRM they use what we JustPaid do is we suck that contract from your CRM software or you can forward it to our unique mailing address that we assigned to you and we our AI will start the process of manually reviewing that contract which is which can be a PDF which can be image or whatever format that you send and we extract that information from that file and make sure who is the vendor who is the customer who is the what are the terms in that what are the services that

the customer is offered by that vendor and what is the price Associated to that service and how often that customer is built by this by this vendor and also like what is the contractual length how long that contract St stands for is it one year two year three year and how often and what are the payment terms like how long you a customer can wait before they can pay bills and all of this information is extracted the background and put it for review for the accountant or the sales rep who is is actually overseeing that customer once they say this is all good they can generate invoice with a single click and they can review the invoice so system is smart enough to understand which services to build at which time so if you are building a early service it will pick up those yearly services in the first invoice if you are building monthly it will pick up that monthly service if that is that particular month's I mean service that you are offering for so it is smart enough to identify which services to build and put that invoice items into invoice and send an invoice to the customer mhm that is that is a beautiful product so you pretty much automated what a what a person would do yes if they are to do it properly exactly super nice how do you how do you build something like this I think just going to the history of honestly some of aia's background you know we worked together for a long time yeah about five years should work together Anelya kind of had a map in her head a blueprint of like how she did it for many many companies and you know

that was partly why we became co-founders is because Anelya was able to do this for so many companies at scale that had huge exits and if we could take what Anelya did and place that into AI literally all these stups of Silicon Valley would be able to benefit from that sort of knowledge yeah so my my background a little bit about 15 years ago 12 years ago I started an accounting company here in Silicon Valley servicing YC funded startups and my my idea was I was public accountant before I was working with a bunch of businesses and I was done with that and I was like I want to work with one company but I wanted like amazing industry and like amazing news field so I offered at that time in 2011 YC batch I offered free accounting services my goal was they will raise Capital they will love me I'll get a job in three months and I can choose which one company I'm going to work at so 3 months passed forward I already had about like 25 customers who were not paying me and they all raise capital and they're like Ana we now can we now can pay you so do you want to work with us and like yeah I'm looking for a full-time job and they're like we don't have enough time for a full-time accountant plus you're so efficient like like there is no need and at that that day I remember I was like I'm not going to be a full-time accountant for any but I'm just going to start my own business and I started my own business and I was growing consistently I had the product Market fit with that company right away U you

know I started growing my team and throughout last what 10 years I've been working with amazing companies sewing like overseeing their growth and you know working on you know their well projections modeling and also working very closely in operations because that would be like couple Founders who just you know out of M it and they need to they have an idea but like okay how do you do business registration how do you set up payroll how do you do billing how do you collect how do you pay people so like all this you know infrastructure I was setting up company after company after company and day after day like right you know I see companies going through the process of okay we have our first Revenue how do we do billing and right so there's a ask for sales contract to be emailed to me I'll read the sales contract then I'll create a billing records and I'll create like maybe followup you know emails and Collections and try to get money in the door there was a lot of work that I did on the back end to help the companies I was working with to be successful and as companies grow like how how many like you know how many hours I would have to spend on managing this AR and it's just it be G that at some point the company will bring this work in house and it will be hiring people and there's problem also with sales contracts or expense like you know vendor contracts those contracts read by many people like you know in the same company and outside of a company but like same document is read few times so you have to read it legal you have

to maybe read the security you have to do it for accounting purposes then you do it for tax purposes then you do it for due diligence purposes for m&a and what not like you all the sales have to be validated how do you know that the compan is being acquired really has1 million in there all right like all those contracts being some people firing don't do that if we got that and yeah yeah we do and that's that's terrible like like you know it's it's it's it's awful so the idea is to be that platform that to validates all of the revenue numbers you know that if your Revenue says if you're using just paid right for your revenues you can be talking to an investor and will correct my revenu through just paid reporting is this and it is truthful numbers and you also delegating this Revenue management to JustPaid when we do the billing we can maintain customer records we maintain frequency frequency of invoicing we maintain Revenue recognition schedules because that affects our tax filings and on the end we also we also help our comp our clients to collect that Revenue you know like okay followup emails you know phone calls how do we get that cash that somebody sign sign off back into your bank account and that's manual process and right now you know that's what we're trying to out how many people did you have in your company to do that for all those startups I think I had like 15 people working doing all of this and my companies ranged from you know serious seat to like I worked with big one big ones like like I worked with segment I worked with task crabbit there

is no AR to to be specifically but like I worked with large companies that required a lot of M course yeah guess you also worked with DrChrono yes yep so which gets us to your background Danielle V you were working on DrChrono together yes yep yeah so I mean I'll give you some background on why I wanted to work on this specific problem and why I felt like there was a need in in Silicon Valley it's easy for a company to generate like $100,000 in revenue and they may be able to track that okay but as you go up like as you get more and more Revenue throughout the years it becomes more messy right you make set a contract that you get paid once you out a that you get paid every six months but once you get it to thousands of customers it becomes more of a sophisticated process where right now the industry is to just hire people you hire people and the people manage all the revenue and you just hire more people and that's just the way that it is that's the way that the world works I can in the the revenue space so at Dr PR some of my history is you know we were a really successful company so I saw that growing pain where we would hire more people for more revenue and then you get more Revenue then you hire more people and then you have to manage all that Revenue which is you know it's it's an arduous process but every company goes through this process where they just hire team members to manage all that you don't have to do all of that and you know me experiencing a successful startup

I felt like there was a need cuz we work together we all work together you know nalia I saw what she was doing in vene I mean he could talk about his background but yeah so I was Dr I was building the building the billing system for for healthcare claims and managing patient Collections and everything so I was building the building system for healthcare part of my job is also build the doctors who are our customers Dr krono so we do have built our own internal ER system which is not the business that we sell but we have to build our doctor so so the three of you anelia has domain expertise you have company building and product building expertise and Engineering expertise you got together started working on this what was the first product I like so we have actually moved quite a bit initially when we started this product we were focusing on bill pay just like paying bills so you have your contractor if you have invoice it's account payable so you upload your bill and U we pay on behalf of you set up a schedule or automatically read through who is the what is the amount that need to be paid and what is the account that the money needs to be transferred so we started with that what the similar to bill.com yeah similar to bill.com like Eon payable featur it like in bild.com and then then we realized that this is not just it that is not the platform that we want we eventually transition into having like analytical pipeline where we have all the data from your multiple systems like QuickBook your Erp solution and if we are using Bank data from we are using collecting Bank

data from your Banks all your transaction records and create a analytical tool that actually helps you see where your money is going through where where you are where you're getting money and where your money is going and then AI came in the AI wave came in like we actually talked to a lot of customers what they actually preferred to have is more of a automation tool that actually helps them all this manual work automated rather than having this analytical dashboard eventually we will have that in our system if the manual process is automated because the basic problem that customers are facing is to scrub the data and consolidate that data into one single platform that's a huge issue so we are trying to solve that problem as we are building our platform prob we go back to this first prototype which is basically BILL.com yeah what do you think about like having similar features that this humongous company that dominates the market how how do you sell something like this to to customers I mean the goal is to honestly Delight people I feel like there's a lot of bad products out there that are just not that userfriendly and you just have to be slightly incrementally more like beautiful in a sense like and have a simpler interface where that alone actually can help make sales and so we were trying to create something honestly just for ourselves in a crazy way it's like the great thing about this company is building it we're using it for ourselves to charge our own customers we're using it to pay our own bills so we're like What do we want which it's a lot of fun to like actually pull contracts into our own software that

we're using to build our customers so we're kind of it it's a lot of fun actually like being that that user but you know billion dollar companies they're out there but you know I'll give you an example like like Ford was out there and Tesa comes along and just starts to do something radically different I think that's what we're trying to do is how do we take a lot of like the AI That's out there and really leverage this technology in a really new unique way but also allow it to function like a bill.com so you know long term you may not you may not need to be involved in everything maybe you're like anything under $50 you know I'm going I'm going to allow 400 fills to go under $50 where I don't have to review those and if you set these like really smart AI tools up you may not have to do every single thing you're sign but you know it's it's a refinement process like you have to work on it every day and software kind of as living and breathing some of the larger companies don't change I guess they're either scared that they're going to break something they're scared of like their user base revolting if like they change things drastically so they don't change much so like a billion dollar company today is not a billion dollar company tomorrow MH right like yeah they get protective over I think it's everybody's problem like your bus success starts meaning so much because everybody's praising you for it so whenever you look at it as a fer or whenever you hire somebody and that actually gets even worse with the people You' hire because they were not there to build

it so they think of it as something magical that you are not trying to change at all but I I think what what's really important to what you said is that you were first protesty I like really caught my attention was pretty much what Bill the call was but were beautiful and I love that it's a great example how fathers build something with a bigger Vision but they start with something that just works and just incrementally a little bit better that's super cool do you remember what like other like first steps you you did as a as a a team of just B I think finding a a good team was critical anelia had a lot of ideas in her head and you know we had Benet and she was throwing IDE after IDE after Benet at at Benet and she took it into her own hands to like find an amazing designer on her team so like finding amazing engineers and a designer to really help us execute and we knew we you know when you have no Revenue at the very first start of company you have to find people that are willing they're like True Believers that are not taking like you know huge million dollar salaries that you get these Believers that really like believe in the vision they really jump on board and you know it was piece by piece that we kind of pieced it together but I mean vet doesn't stop voting with every free second he's trying to execute on code anelia is like trying to really you know talk me and anelia are talking to cell so there's there's a whole process that happens you have to continually talk to sales CU if you don't have

customers why are you even building right so let's that's the super interesting so we kind of broke down your product and the history Let's try to look into how your company is built now in terms of people how many people do you have I think it's 10 people we have right now we have a mix of engineering sales and and marketing so we have three Engineers working remotely one contractor the engineers are building the platform they are full stack Engineers so working both on building the nice interfaces that the customers use also the magic that happens in with AI and the back end with databases that they will be setting up and de building stuff and we do have a one designer who is actually building this cool designs very intive and also sophisticated enough to accommodate all the complex workflows that the C has to deal with let's go just talk a little bit more about the engineers so when hiring Engineers do you try to hire people that are overqualified with what you actually need or do you want to find people who are right for this job what I actually look for when I'm hiring Engineers is not just coding skills like there if you want to just hire coder you can find one but we also want to have someone who sees the vision as the founder sees because as we as the time grows this engineer who hired at the early stage will be the person who will become an executive who will be running a whole team so if they cannot see the vision what the founder is seeing right now it is very difficult to to actually transition this person to an exit level over time so the

first thing that I look for is the product how they can visualize the product the second quality that I'm looking for in the engineers is constantly delivering once the engineers is constantly delivering they will get a lot of feedback on that and they will iterate what they're working on and that will eventually become a good feedback loop so that they will grow themselves as an engineer as a leader as a product person whatever they want and the third quality that I'm looking for is dealing with the hardships M especially in startups there is a problem with constantly shifting because we are delivering for the customers customers is it why they are remotes did you lock them in the dungeon no actually we actually this some of it's an interesting story some of these Engineers are like they they actually contacted us rather than we coming us they allowed the product they want to work for us they said we will work for free for some time let's let's we and we tested it out and worked out well and they are very amazing they're doing good and they themselves bought their friends to work for us so that's how we grew the team hey so we got the recipe for a successful startup on our stage you need to get a person who worked for free and that if then and then other people join who also work for free and bring their friends to work for free they're good at dealing with hard chips and eventually but they they have to share the there's some truth in that truth in that yeah yeah because product vision and then dealing with all this hardship is is a necessary skill when you're working for startup but

we are paying though we are paying right now once they have proved we have to keep those Talent very longer so we have to provide all the things that they need either it's a equity part or it's a cash compensation or it could be the responsibility or leadership some people wants to grow themselves as Leaders we have to give that as a as a compensation as well so we have to provide opportunities so other than Engineers you got salese yes we do have a head of sales we he also is an amazing sales lead who worked at Dr krono so we're fortunate we're working with him again so you sold Dr PR right yes and now you're stripping it off its steam no the these are people that are you know I think people just move on from from a company and you know V moved on from Dr Crown years ago before I sold the company and so Anelya we just kept in touch right so like B he moved on I knew he was like one of the best people I ever worked with I was like if we ever have a chance let's work together he posted it something on LinkedIn one day so I sold Dr krono and you know I'm like what's my next move going to be you know thinking for long and hard but me and V actually met up U you know he moved on from rapro and then we we met up and just started brainstorming and we didn't have an idea and I knew anelia for years and she moved on from doer par years before I sold it and I knew she was like one of the best people to work with because she

could build her own company and she executed like flawlessly on her own company and Anelya reached out to one night and I was talking to the and you know anelia started to lay lay out this like big vision of like I don't want you know I I want like software to do what I did and I'm like I I understood like the vision and I understood the problem because of running my comp my my past company and you know I think if you keep good relationships with people like we you know that you sometimes work together in the future and and that's really where like all these people are starting to come together again well I called Daniel I'm like Daniel I think I'm crazy because I have zero technical background I never built any kind of product I built a service company but I it is this company bill.com and every single person whoever uses this they hate it accountants hate it for this reasons and at listed reasons and Founders and approval process the people involved they also hated because it's so terrible user user experience in execution and everything and it also doesn't solve the problem of controlling site you just take yeah you scrape information you type it all yourself kick it up to appro approver it's not his money it's a company's money they're just like approve let's go and then like with the audit accountants at the end of the year we're like oh you know unfortunately we paid this people when the contract expired unfortunately we didn't collect this Revenue because salese never delivered us this Revenue number so like sales contract so like how do we actually make it not only just transfer money and click approver

approve but be the support and you know the be the Cod pilot in some way right it's nice to say it now with AI so that's what I was talking to Daniel Daniel I think I'm crazy and I think at that point I called Daniel to hear a confirmation that I am crazy I shouldn't do that and Daniel was like wait a minute you going 100 miles per hour let me write it down so what are you thinking and then I was like oh yeah I want the the analytics platform and a decision making plat like decision making because contract has so much information there and it's supposed to be it's supposed to allow me to make a decision like hey can I hire like a developer five months from now at the salary if I have this many contracts and pipeline right like can I do that usually my people I worked with the startup Founders they'll ask me and I'll look at the numbers like yes you can like no not really like you your receivable cycle is too slow like it's impossible but we can analyze it we can give them this answers so Daniel was like we would spend like two hours I was outlining entire whole vision and I really also wanted to go into like factoring and receivables and allow unlocking capital and like know for companies and then like then I think next day you like I talk to V let's talk again and then and then theni you was like you know what you're not crazy actually you're look crazy and I want to build it with you and I was a c I expected a different answer I expected to be told that's not going to

work Cal down keep doing what you're doing you know and Daniel is extremely supportive and we connected and then they like we should do y combinator and we applied on a deadline so for me it was very important like I've been working with YC funded companies for years since like 2011 I knew Partners I did some of their accounting I knew you know a lot of companies failed and successes you know what they do with their taxes I don't I don't do taxes but a lot of so for me that was kind of I need I I wanted that I wanted to be part of a community and as a solo founder previously like feeling supported is one of those you know leverages let like clevers I you can you I have to be part of a community where like everybody's rooting for your success you know like they're posting things on LinkedIn and people are up like you know up voting it and what not it's such a tightly neat community and everybody is struggling and we understand that it's very hard and for me that was important and for Daniel I remember you said like you were going like oh it's a flywheel effect you know everybody is in this network they need somebody to take ownership of accounts receivable of accounts payable they need somebody to take to ask those questions and let it be a platform that available 247 because Founders have like 247 anxiety and like I'm going to wait for my accountant to wake up to ask them this question and I'm not like they top priority because they might have like 15 other companies like I want just like go in the platform and like get my numbers

all right my my kpis are good all right I can go to my investor meeting l can say like this is this is what I'm having without needing to slack everybody that is a pretty unique value prop like being able to get you know to solve anxiety yeah at 2 a. yeah what do you do you go to JustPaid and it gives you the answers so that's kind of the idea and then flywheel effect is of course unbelievable for for a company that solves problems like our like what we're doing and Daniel you be at YC in the this and you went through it like this year yeah Phil was it so gave them like 7% of your Equity again I think any the right investors on board early helps a company immensely so if you think about why combinator it's hard when you're on the outside to understand when you're why would you like do I combinator I kind of equate it to like a network of like thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs when we first started I was asking a billionaire and me and van went an email chain like what actually we use with the billionaire who's in y combinator and he's responding saying this is the TCH St we use this we're doing here and you know I don't talk to this person often but we're in Y Combinatortogether so like they responded immediately and started to give us ideas on Tech stock and me and B were brainstorming on that I kind of view it like sports teams like if you're like a like a soccer team or football team or you know you need a coach and in YC there's a lot of confidential coaches that really

will like help give you advice and what's funny is we just came back actually from a like it basically a three-day Retreat out in the woods with like about a 100 Founders from yator and you just get information overload from like really successful people really smart people just throwing so many reasons and and strategies at you that you kind of have to process all that and there's these like secret meetups like there's one tonight there's a secret Meetup around fintech we're going to the secret meet up where there's a bunch of successful fintech Founders like meting that are all in y Dominator talking about like how they did it and what they're doing next and that if they can do it you can do it right so you see a lot of like you know FR hesky if he could do it someone else can do it like the founders of stripe if they can do it you can do it you get this like really unique experience where like we're all kind of popping each other up hear any like insights upon this vide I mean maybe if you guys want to it's very connected very connecting yeah the the free flow of ideas and you know being knowing that you're not recorded that you can like really go and share something radical that's in privacy and security of this community is one of the dearest experiences I had you know so probably now I'm not going to share anything also you will get lot of inside ideas how compan is dealing with so when you are to talking about talking in open public or in open Meetup you won't Express all those details but when you are in words and when you are

like having like a closed group of Founders you will open up all the problems that you you are dealing with maybe that problems we will eventually face over time we might have a solution because that person who we connected in this camp for 3 Days might have solved it by the time so it's like we are building or we are like understanding the the Journey of this software of this startup before even we understand it or we we go through it that is super important when you have a medium where you can connect with other Founders I remember being a founder and this is incredibly lowly because you constantly face rejection everybody rejects you people don't want to work for you investors don't want to invest clients don't want to buy your stuff even like landlords don't want to leave you in office and and then you you kind of have to be projecting success because you are leading a team you are you need to create this story about how awesome this company is so clients want en join other clients using the service right so I guess getting in the woods with other fers you could actually be a little more honest that hey we're like failing every day we're being rejected right that's pretty cool I want fa's watching us to understand that well it's fine to fail daily it's just up toing for fast failers is what really matters so how do you sell your product now what is what is working can you share like what what is the value proposition that you be you I mean we're taking a lot of different strategies on sales getting a Zoom by Zoom meeting we're literally pitching different business owners on the

value I've getting on Zoom meetings literally every day try to figure out new ways to reach out new novel ways that'll let get people engaged spending time with people and aring their problems Anelya has a really good What was that book you told everybody M you know I read the book because of anelia and you know she has she uses that strategy quite a bit I'm just understanding like what the Real Pain point is and then V also you know he's get an armed call so it's you know at the end of the day it's about the sales and the product so like just literally hitting a pavement and just like talking to as many customers as possible we did hire an early DPF growth that he is really using a lot of strategies really sophisticated strategies just weren't around before like you know AI based email messaging we record every Zoom meeting to make sure like we could just like process it another thing is like the engineer is a little bit async with us so like we sent them all over the zoom meetings MH and you know just so they understand like what's going on and they code and fact watch yeah yeah usually Engineers don't know what sales people are selling but then they get surpr like why did you sell this this will never work yeah right but you know I think I asked a couple of the engineers like what happened in your past stany that fell and they said like they didn't talk to the cells like and I'm like okay we got to like move everyone aligned and the team is it's very possible to like do that so it is a new world like where Co

happened and I think you know people don't have to be on the same room so we're really taking advantage of how do we work together in like really productive ways MH so so what can can can can you give us an example what is what do you see resonating with the customers right now the most are all of the teachers and we life I think I think the best that I'm picking up on in terms of customer like customer product fit in in our product is automation so right now we are selling to Founders Founders who are doing the founder Le sales and for them it's like oh my goodness I signed a sales contract I now have to figure out how to do invoicing I have to figure out how to work log into to my billing processing like stripe plat platform I have to create a billing plan I have to create these things then I have to create a customer record and I have to remember to do certain things and like before I make a step forward I have to make like 15 Steps to the side you know then then I can make a step forward that's annoying I don't want to do it like all right so with us it's just automation you have your Microsoft Word document you send it to us that's Automation and we create customer we create building plans oh we we're really looking at it very creative way and figuring out what works what works for them then another another pain point that we hitting in conversation I'm I'm having with the founders cost of processing cost of merchant fees and those are very expensive like on your high ACV sale you just might

have lost 1% or you spent six months trying to close a deal and your Merchant processor just took 1% a bite of that you know like that's outrageous and in this economy we cannot afford it so we just paid when we charging like per transaction and it's a fixed fee amount no matter if it's a half a million doll invoice with like a $2,000 invoice with us it's predictable we're not charging you for percentage of you at sale and we are the one processing the payment we are you know we creating unique payment link We collect the money and then the next step all right as a Founder let sale how do you make you send an invoice you manage that and then what do you do when your customer didn't pay you we feel very shy to follow up and say Hey you know you signed the contract and you know you haven't paid me so fathers do feel that we all feel that asking for money is very is not most not the most comfortable so I had to do it a lot for my clients so I would be like the one emailing hey you know what invoices unpaid two invoices are unpaid what do we do what's a problem like are you missing something is it the right per are you the right person to receive this so we're like now taking this stressful point of asking for money we're taking it from our customers from our users and saying well we're the ones to do this uncomfortable thing we're the one going to hunt down who owes you money and bring this money into your bank account so yeah it is it is it is and I find it like

this like okay there some customers like oh yeah we we really like our customers are paying us we have like contract with Apple it just takes forever but we don't want to lose 1% on accepting checks from Apple that's ridiculous did you pick this side the the receivables side on purpose because Founders who get receivables they're growing and Founders who don't I mean like everybody pays right somebody everybody pays somebody I think so we started with like my whole idea was in the beginning it was build like intelligent BILL.com right that was an idea was like aggregator of financial data as we started growing it as we started selling it you're like all right like it's harder to sell the AP side because what companies have on you know until they're like serious B serious C company their expenses expenses mostly like it's 80% pedal and then you have SAS and then maybe you have some meals and in travel and but now nobody even does that so to manage a side it's there is not early really early need for Founders who we selling our product and if you're going to go up Market you know the the that software is already like it needs to have bells and whistles and a cherry on top we cannot get there that fast but with Revenue there is so much of the pains that people are experiencing earlier and for like okay we can sell our product already now you know that's how how we got into AR later down the road there will be a platform that's both but we'll see how you know how we're going to be like you know the the revenue should pick up from one side to bring up the

other side part of the business up that's kind of my view what do you guys think yeah I mean like if you get a startup paid they'll pay you I mean it's really that b and that this Insight came from Anelya like if you get a startup P they'll pay you so we we built out the pay first which is money going out of the startup and we're like wait let's just focus on accounts receivable and get that really dialed in and then accounts table still out already you counts receivable if we get that really just getting people paid when they need to get paid it you know it it made total sense to me when we were like talking through this way more but you know just to getting getting product live We Built account payable we're like let's get something out we immediately started executing you know how soon did you require funding so you started three of you work King I guess you did not take any money for yourselves how long before you were actually able to raise the money it was really fast it was kind of like lightning honestly like we got together we started to self fund it and then you know we applied to Y Combinator literally after talking and it was like couple yeah so September 12th we applied November 19th we got accepted and VGC received our first tranch of financing from YC was in January but we already had some investors who gave us money because they wanted to make sure that they got in so I think that was we invested in January too yeah yeah yeah I think that's up normal for some startups like we we were moving fast we found

our first Engineers really fast like people are just coming to us it's a it's definitely a weird time where a lot of people will work with you because there's so many layoffs happening right and then investors are out there looking for like the next big things so it's like there's a really good interesting ecosystem happening they say the markets are bad out there I think the startup world is honestly flourishing there's so much happening right now you consider yourselves an AI company well absolutely yes to answer that question absolutely we do have ai at the Forefront of every action that you take cont and take the main intention of that is the ChatGPT or openi has democratize this AI to everyone so now everyone understands what AI means and what are the side effects of it and how to utilize it that actually opened up doors for us to integrate all that nice things that we get from AI into our platform and we are cautious about using AI not everywhere but where it is intended to be used for example manual entry is something that people hate people don't want to enter the details which can be automated with AI and people don't want to like compare two things and say okay this is right this is right a reconcile thing so that's where reconciliation also handled by AI in addition to that people are so used to this chat like asking questions and taking actions based up chat so we also have buil a chat ecosystem which are which is like a a layer on top of our existing application so you can make take actions like send an invoice and type it type the customer name or yes you will recognize

who is the customer and when to send invoice and it will send automatically the invoice similarly getting metrics what's my balance in my bank account you can get that numbers automatically in our system so we are definitely moving in the direction to utilize eii at the at the fullest do you have any AI Talent yes I worked in AI I worked with AI systems before and all the engineers are also learning to use Ai and it is the the utilizing AI has so become so easy it became so easy that you don't need a special type of skill you need you don't need to go get a PhD to build any assist when is there going to be a point where your company was need a few phds well yes we might run into that issue when we want to have built all the systems internally rather than relying on openi or anthropic or Google we if we want to build all over the systems internally and we want to build a I would say like a virtual Anelya into our system so that I think we need to get phds at that time I mean it's similar to like what's happening with like you know back way back when you had to buy your own servers you had to know how to run Linux or Unix yeah you know now you don't need to like run your own servers you don't need to know what the temperature of the room is right so like we're really leveraging like these companies are getting funded billions of dollars why not leverage some of that technology because it's they' got a lot of people there now we you know what gives us an advantage is they don't

have the financial right so so like as people connect in they pull in their financial data we keep it private the goal is to keep it private and then leverage these other Technologies so we may not need as many phds as like an open AI or an anthropic and they that's their whole business for us we're looking at like leveraging all of that so you touched a very interesting topic and there was actually a question on LinkedIn so we told people at LinkedIn what they wanted to know and there was a question how much does it matter to your customers that you keep your their data private how much of an audit do you have to pass if any H do you have to build something special to say like Hey we're qualify and authorize to work with financial data that's a very good question I would like to answer that so I see the financial data in two two aspects so when you de associate the numbers with the the pii data the customer information company information it's basically the numbers M and it doesn't have much of like Association to it what AI needs is that numbers how to Crunch that numbers so we have to create a ecosystem where you have all these transactions over a month over month and if you want to gener see the natural progression of your burn or natural progression of your Revenue you need those transactions data so when we are passing this information to AI models we are not actually passing the company information or the the the the piia information which is really critical we are passing those numbers making sure that information that the we send to the third party Services is completely

isolated and it is independent of company and we we are very cautious about storing critical information like Bank trans bank account number routing number all their are there like social security number or so we we are trying to make sure this information is stored in the highly secured manner so we for example we do not actually store the bank account number or R number we use a service called plot which which is like securing the platform is that bread and butter securing the managing the bank transactions is there better and better so we are using those type of services to make sure we pull in only the information that we need and and we will utilize it just in time MH so that our platform is not vulnerable to attacks and make sure we're not like exploiting the data in any way good that's a that's like a good answer can we back to September imagine you're there with what you already know what would you what would you have done different I would say for myself I would other than not working with those guys right I think what I would do differently is I was just start sales earlier that's what I was start start differently you know my learnings are this which is completely opposite from what I've been doing for last you know years doing accounting and selling the services that existed and I knew how to do like that's so unnatural to me but in software you go out you do the sale and then you build a product especially in the startup environment so that's something that I'm learning actively and and it's hard and it's unnatural but you know that's what I would do differently I think that's

one thing I think it's a tough question to answer because we're so early this is like the first inning of a long journey I think we're fortunate right we we're in Silicon Valley we have connections we're working with amazing people like it's hard to tell what is like not right if that makes sense or we're like it's kind of like we're fing as we go so it's it's hard to tell I mean we've been fortunate to find all the amazing Engineers we've been fortunate to find amazing designer amazing investor so it was really up until this point I think we've had a really good process you know there's always more you can do right like I want to be on the phone 247 if I can do like I wish I could do 100 phone calls a day like with sales that's the one thing I'm like how do I do that for myself right I don't know any c yeah I think we are just one year old so young we will not have a lot of answers right now maybe 10 years from now we will have a lot of answers maybe we would have chosen Bitcoin or maybe we would have chosen something else for the payments something disruptive but right now it is so early to answer those questions whatever we have chosen so far it's working out that's pretty full does it feel like you have the sacred letters product Market it's a tough product Market fit in my head is like every other call closes mhm I think it's not that ratio yet so there's a lot of feedback a lot of Nos and some yeses so it's we're getting to that point it just takes time you if

we had product Market fit we'd raise a large round when we're ready and that's like we feel like you know you get on a call you can close it pretty fast so what's your strategy on looking does it feel it's like somewhere adjacent to where you are be proud for yeah at the speed we're moving I would say it's it's probably not far you know we've been executing our Mis Vision like a lot of startups I would say like bounce around and they just don't execute they'll either work on this idea then they'll jump forward to that idea and they'll jump to this idea I feel like that's good in some senses cuz you're feeling out like the spaces and different you know ways to test product I talk to Founders all the time that are like pivoting and I'm like you've been doing this three years like where's your customers at this point right like so for us we've been beating this St like how do you get the money moved faster and an easier so every day it's getting like better and better it's like that process but I would say yes the answer is you know we're getting there I'm just curious how many domains did you purchase when you found your name just paid I think you're like somewhere around 30 35 yeah you also have sell lot lots in you in you 30 myself yes we had a company name original was Loop for and it was an iteration on forloop which is like an accounting you do same work over and over and in engineer for Loop right you guys will explain better so you since you're doing the same work over and over again you're Auto since we

are automating that we named it luk for and then I think since we are selling it to accountants we should be accountants or people who are in finance maybe we should rename it to name that makes sense that easily people can understand and relate to that's where we rename to just speed oh like say saying loop four also people get full of questions right is there a four in there is it how do you spell it and now I remember I was literally on the floor I was like okay we need a better name like I'll call it the couch I'll call it the Billow like everything I could see right was just so desperate just never call it your dog's name yeah the company was Cher relapse yeah that's a good and then you sawell the company and know like do I still call my dog chair right do I still own the trademark hey dog let's go yeah yeah so then it's like oh just paid and I remember I went online and just paid thato the main was $35 and I was like that that's good I'm cheap that's that's perfect so I called the guys like how on just be yeah and yeah can understand is it we have this fun little thing going every time we watch we stream probably not say this but we stream YC demo day inside our LP Community awesome yeah but we like do live commentary I have a little inside J going where we collect startup that have the same name or similar name and we were laughing at it and now it turns out we have multiple of those in our portfolio like we have company is called Creator one is spelled with

an eight that happens yeah it definitely happens a lot where it is yeah but just baate is is unique at least in our portfolio do you see a lot of competition what do you think about competition in general if a competition is there I think we are building a good problem I mean the problem that is already there in and any many people are facing it so it actually gives more confidence if we have competition because there is a huge value that we can gain from this platform ultimately competition is not something that we are worried about our main intention is to get more customers if we are solving the right problem or not everyone have their own perspective to solve problems whether that problem works or not It ultimately decided by the customer so I feel rather than worrying too much about the comp ation obsess about UPS obsess about the customer and their feedback is more valuable he agree with that I think it's we don't really live at the competition at all when we're building a product it's like how do we get ourselves paid and how do we make it easy for us and then that will make it easier for our users as well so like there's a lot of natural process you know in your head you've envisioned something that how would you you know send your money out from your LPS to your esence in an easier way it's in your head you know but you're doing it like your way now it's frustrating I'm sure there's a lot of frustrations we're literally angelist is pretty good at that okay yeah so they sold it but yeah it used to be a huge pain Point got it but

it's a pain point a lot yeah it's definitely a pain point to for us to like collect money so we're like how do we make that easy collecting money from LPS is is rough that's yeah yeah I would assume makes it super easy it all flies in they're us-based and they subscribe to a but like half of our us- based Ops don't like K near I'm not giving my bank accounts to angelist got it like they will get breached and they're a startup and yeah so that becomes a problem and then people wiring from Japan that's another kind of problem because their banks are weird and then European banks are even worse and here they need to get a wire before they sign the contract and in Europe they need to sign the contract before they can initiate a wire so that yeah that requires a lot of manual work but in theory is they supposed to be super super simple like subscribe to Netflix yeah we you check for there like in the ideal world like two people have intention of of making stuff work together so one agrees to pay to like do work and another one agrees to pay this just has to happen so what you guys building I think it's it's very important then chasing contracts is probably my worst nightmare from all yeah so you know yeah we had an iteration where we worked with families did direct to Consumer and these were AI cameras that would look after elderly people and that would always feel wrong asking them for money when they miss the payment that was and at that time we were using build that cons it's not very friendly experience got it so you guys no

this really intimately actually yeah for us the the JustPaid has like multiple problems at solving but managing all it in one Continuous Flow so ownership of billing it's a no code billing solutions so you don't need to invest in Engineers you don't need to train accountants on a specific Billing System that's somebody created years ago and no longer with your company it's specific and we do billing from both usage based billing we do tier based billing you know item based billing and the cycle of creating Revenue tracking Revenue recognizing Revenue properly for tax purposes managerial reports you know Financial project actions and then completely owning also delegating the piece of collecting that Revenue to JustPaid and how we charging it's a monthly platform fee plus usage fee per transaction at just $2 a transaction so it's very scalable very very ve very affordable yeah very affordable so who's your ideal m is it a B2B SAU B2B SAU is the best at this point and then as we grow will expand of course it will be like you know could be like ideally it's like whoever does okay let's say I you know usage based billing right or tiered pricing we that totally have those case nailed down or you like oh my goodness I'm selling I'm a PR agency and I'm selling my services and like I have this many contracts and I don't want to go into any building system I just want to message that hey I need to create this in voice so like as soon as that sales contract is signed the building sequence starts you no longer part of it it's done it's completed it's reported that's it so any other Service Company right like service C

yep absolutely he yeah I I could use it yeah great yeah I'll follow up after that's that's cool I don't know what kind of audience we're GNA get on this show but usually what we're getting on our social is followers followers followers or people who want to become followers M there are also a lot of people who can go and join your team and work for you we have a lot of Engineers do we do I want to touch on on that like like what is like working for just speed sure I can touch upon that so working at just speed we are a very small Ned team and asynchronous communication is the first approach that we taking because it's a remote friendly world and also we are making sure that everyone is responsible like there is no like hierarchy since you are owning a particular piece of thing you will be responsible for it and you will own it if there is any issue that or any customer who says that I need this particular feature that particular person will be automatically cranking stuff and making changes to it and U addressing the customer problem so it's it should be as simple as the customer is the bus rather than keeping a hierarchy of manager and director something like that so we want to pass that feedback from customer to the very engineer in the in the in the end so that's the culture that we are building and in addition to that we also want to honor every single idea that we are getting from our developers or the sales reps or marketing people what we are trying to do is we have a like a bi-weekly sync up where we talk about

what are the problems that we are having and how we solve that problems for sales we do have like a sales problems a separate meeting for sales meeting where Engineers will attend and actually give their contribution similarly we do have engineering syn UPS where analia will join or Daniel will join and give some inputs to it so it's like we are solving each and every single problem in the space but ideas from other sectors are also taken into consideration which I haven't seen any startup I have worked at no what just jumping in this Cod actually get pushed to production also so like it's not like a large company where you'll be coding for six months and then maybe your stuff is released here every engineer an internal function what's that like ex exactly like that isn't launs to to to like the primary users so here literally you know everybody that does work is like it they're contributing to the company so it's at that scale where you can't hide if you can't code so we know immediately who like is amazing and like you know every coder is amazing that we have and they're just all you know developing at a very fast rate every week we have show Intel basically where we sit down for an hour at 8 in the morning Monday morning and the engineers like demo product it's it's a lot of fun that's probably like the funnest funnest time because you're seeing like the newest stuff like as we as we're building it then we're giving real time feedback you know well so where do you Source the team fra other than Dr FR honestly it's been really a lot of inbound like in the last week we

had I was like 300 K out day supply Engineers wow yeah it's insane like how many people want to work with us and we've been really pick so we've been really just going through resumés understanding who's who everybody that we got in an interview actually has to code like real time they're fixing bugs on their own product so we'll give them a hack aone M and that hackathon sit there and say like well what's wrong with this and if they freeze did they coat it or did they are they like a deep thinker like do they want to take a day to like fix the problem but to allow them to use Kila a yes we actually use we give a full access to eii tools because we are building an AI solution so makes sense we're open about it we developers use cop aot and we do have like tools that automatically create create pull request if there is a bug we ask the AI to generate a PR so that the developer don't need to write the boiler plate information and we do have eii review going on so it's it's the the newest generation company that we're building that is dope well thank you guys so much for joining and for making this happen like this is a prototype of like fre Alpha we'll try to re iterate and we'll definitely have to do a lot of work to make it better but without you it wouldn't be possible I don't I I I hope that somebody out there who watches it will like it maybe even subscribe to the channel and maybe they will come check out your product or come work for you but it's it's going to be tricky

to get through you know like 300 people candidates for one one position then is a tough ratio by getting into Stanford yeah it's it's it's hard yeah but that's the that speaks highly over your team so the team is definitely very very good thank you thank you this is great thank you thank you guys