Bizora Brews

What does it take to build a new general ledger from scratch when the two incumbents have owned the category for over thirty years?

Jeff Seibert is the founder and CEO of Digits, an AI native accounting platform going head to head with QuickBooks and Xero. Before Digits, Jeff cofounded Crashlytics, the mobile crash reporting company that now runs on billions of smartphones worldwide, sold it to Twitter, and went on to lead consumer product there during the company's IPO years.

Together they explore why Jeff chose to build a full ledger instead of a dashboard layered on top of QuickBooks, what it took to run a real bookkeeping firm internally just to stress test the product, and why large language models still cannot be trusted to do the math in accounting.

Jeff walks through the two calls from Twitter that led to the Crashlytics acquisition, the patent Digits holds on self improving regex models that predates the current AI wave, and the moment CLA selected Digits as its future platform for thousands of clients. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to earn trust in an industry that changes accounting software once a decade at most.

What happens to an accounting firm's identity when its managing partner gets four weeks notice to step into the role?

Wayne is the managing partner of Haskell and White, a Southern California accounting firm. Before that he spent ten and a half years at BDO, then known as Seidman and Seidman, rising from audit staff in Beverly Hills to partner. He has also spent time on the board of LEA Global, an international alliance of independent CPA firms, and taught auditing and intermediate accounting at Cal State Fullerton for almost two decades.

Together they explore how Wayne became managing partner with just four weeks notice after cofounder Steve Haskell was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and what it meant to have fifteen months working alongside Steve during his treatment, absorbing a lifetime of institutional knowledge in real time. They also get into why Haskell and White has stayed independent while private equity buys up firm after firm across the profession, and what Wayne means when he says the goal is life work balance, not work life balance.

Wayne traces his own path back further than most, from a bicycle paper route in New Jersey to six years at McDonald's, where he became a swing manager and learned to reconcile hamburger patty counts against register receipts before he ever opened an accounting textbook. Tune in for a conversation about staying independent, transferring knowledge instead of hoarding it, and building a firm around people rather than a balance sheet.

What does it actually take to convince an industry built on trust and referrals to adopt something new, and why do three founders attacking completely different parts of the accounting workflow keep arriving at the same lessons about how this profession actually buys?

This episode brings together Dan Berenholtz, cofounder and CEO of Stanford Tax, Jordan Vickery, cofounder of Vinyl, and Andrew Rea, cofounder and CEO of Taxwire, for a wide ranging conversation on building software for accountants. Dan started at the IRS before landing at Stanford and eventually Wix, and built Stanford Tax to fix the broken client intake process using prior year data. Jordan and his cofounders ran a marketing agency for accounting tech companies before building Vinyl, an AI meeting assistant purpose trained on accounting terminology and context. Andrew ran finance at a fast growing school lunch company, got frustrated trying to buy sales tax software that actually worked, and built Taxwire as both a tax engine and a managed service.

Together they explore how each of them found product market fit in an industry that moves almost entirely on word of mouth, why throwing AI at a problem without deeply understanding it usually makes the product worse rather than better, and what they would each choose to fix if they could spend the next eighteen months on a single technical problem inside their companies.

Dan explains why Stanford Tax's first product, launched without the personalization layer, sat unused for an entire tax season before the company cracked the formula that got firms handing over their credit cards. Andrew walks through the thirty thousand dollars he personally spent on a bad implementation with an incumbent tax vendor before deciding to build the alternative himself. Tune in for a conversation about what it really takes to earn trust in one of the most conservative buying communities in software.

What happens when a region skips straight from having no tax system at all to running some of the most advanced real time reporting in the world? Eoin Fitzgerald has spent his career answering that question from the inside, and this episode digs into why the GCC's compliance future looks nothing like anywhere else.

Eoin currently leads tax at Keeyns in the UAE, building out a function from the ground up in a market where tax as a concept did not exist eight years ago. Before that he spent time in house at Dell managing compliance across dozens of entities and countries, and before that he was in consulting at BDO. That arc, from advising clients from the outside to owning the outcome from the inside, shapes almost everything he talks about in this conversation.

Together they explore the difference between giving good tax advice and giving advice a business can actually use and scale, what it looks like to build a tax function in a region with no legacy systems or institutional habits to unwind, and why real time government reporting in the GCC is shifting the real work of tax teams from filing to explaining anomalies the algorithm flags automatically.

Eoin talks through what it was like managing thousands of filings across Europe on spreadsheets at Dell, and what changes when a government portal can question a single invoice within weeks instead of waiting years for an audit. Tune in for a conversation about what tax compliance looks like when a region builds its system from zero instead of retrofitting one that is decades old.

Eoin's Article: https://keeyns.com/news/chapter-1-the-indirect-tax-function-as-it-stands-today

What happens when two venture capitalists trade a fund for a product roadmap, and a bootstrapped founder becomes one of the accounting industry's most trusted vendors without ever raising outside money?

This episode of Bizora Brews' Accounting Founder Series brings together three builders reshaping the accounting tech stack from three different angles. Blaze O'Byrne, co-founder of Byron, left a venture role at City Ventures, where he backed companies like Deepgram, to build AI-driven tax document processing, following years at Credit Suisse and a computer science degree from the University of Chicago.

Camden Bean, co-founder of Ping Assistant, built the first accounting firm partnership program at Divvy before its acquisition by Bill.com, then ran a $100 million venture fund before selling his carried interest to build full time.

Dan Pinkous, founder and CEO of Truss, bootstrapped a document intake and tax workflow platform from scratch starting in late 2022, without ever raising outside capital, and now counts many of the top 100 accounting firms as customers.

Together they explore why two of them walked away from venture capital to become operators instead, what it actually took to earn trust with CPAs after years of broken promises from legacy vendors, and why they see partnership, not competition, as the winning strategy in a market too complex for any single platform to own.

The conversation covers how Byron's document processing pipeline first got tested through an unplanned pilot on Truss's platform, why Ping was built on the bet that AI will free accountants to talk to clients more rather than less, and how the wave of private equity money entering accounting since November 2021 is reshaping buying behavior across the industry. Tune in for a conversation about what it takes to build trust, product, and a business inside one of the last industries AI hasn't fully transformed yet.

What happens to a tax career built on international structuring when a five word email from a national partner make you question whether the work still needs you?

Muhammad Yammout is a Senior Manager in International Tax at EY, where he has spent his career since starting in Diversified Staff Group and moving into International Tax Services. Before EY, he worked tax controversy at Optima Tax Relief, closing audits. He later completed a tax LLM at Loyola. His path started even earlier, as a teenage spoken word poet and volunteer poetry mentor before he ever touched a tax return.

Together they explore what changed as LLM's came around and what actually gets harder (not easier) between making manager and making senior manager at a Big Four firm, and why Muhammad thinks the next decade of tax work belongs to a new hybrid role he calls the tax engineer.

Tune in for a conversation about what it takes to stay relevant in a profession that is being rebuilt from the ground up.

What happens to trust when AI can do the work but the client still needs to believe in the person doing it?

This episode is a founder series conversation with Thomas Shelley, co founder of Magnetic, and Anderson Petergeorge, co founder of Quanto. Thomas built his career through Zynga, and Keeper Tax before starting Magnetic, an AI tax preparer built on a multi agent system with EAs and CPAs reviewing every return before it reaches the firm. Anderson's path ran through auditing, private equity before he built a bookkeeping firm and eventually pivoted Quanto into helping accounting firms grow through their personal brand.

Together they explore why automating the operational side of tax prep does not eliminate the need for humans, it just moves them to where the value actually is. They talk through the shift from the Big Four model and small firm owners building their own client bases the way consumer founders build audiences. They also get into why so many firm owners are choosing to buy or start small practices right now, even without a tax background, and what that means for the next few years of the industry.

Thomas talks through the actual mechanics of scanning documents, delegating to sub agents, and running quality control loops that free up reviewers to focus on judgment calls instead of data entry. Anderson breaks down how he coaches accountants who have never posted online to find the story already sitting in their meeting notes. Tune in for a conversation about where the human stays essential once the software gets good enough to do almost everything else.

What does it take to defend a tax credit once the IRS decides to take a closer look?

Andrew Brewster is a Senior Director at Alvarez and Marsal Tax in Washington DC, where he leads work across research and development tax credits and IRS examination defense. Before A&M, Andrew clerked in the Department of Justice Tax Division, interned at the IRS, and spent nearly a decade at Deloitte building his expertise in R&D credit studies from the inside of both the government and the profession.

Together they explore what actually qualifies as research activity under Section 41, the documentation mistakes that turn a clean credit claim into an audit problem, and how the R&D incentives landscape keeps shifting as states and the federal government change their rules. They also get into what it is like to sit across the table from the IRS after having worked inside it, and how that perspective changes the way Andrew approaches examination defense today.

Andrew has spent his career on both sides of the tax incentives equation, from interpreting the rules at the DOJ and IRS to helping companies claim what they are actually owed at Deloitte and now A&M. Tune in for a conversation about what it really takes to build a credible, defensible tax incentives practice in a field where the rules rarely stay still.

What happens when three founders, each betting on a completely different piece of the accounting stack, end up needing each other to win?

That's the setup for this episode of Bizora Brews. Pujun Bhatnagar is founder and CEO of Kintsugi, a sales tax compliance platform serving over 7,000 clients across 102 countries, built after watching his father and grandfather navigate the same compliance mess as CPAs and after his own stint at Meta.

Leroy Kerry is cofounder and CEO of Filed, an AI tax return preparation platform based in Stockholm, previously part of the founding team at Juni.

David Lam is cofounder and CEO of Abacor, an AI meeting assistant built for accounting firms, previously at Gusto after starting his career as a practicing accountant.

Together they explore why none of them are trying to build a closed ecosystem that does everything, how pricing in this space is shifting away from flat seat based software toward usage and outcome based models as AI output becomes the actual deliverable, and what it takes to earn trust with firms who have been burned by tools that weren't built for their profession.

Pujun explains why Kintsugi gives away its Nexus study for free rather than charging thousands for it the way Big Four firms once did. Leroy talks through what he calls tax engineers, the CPAs and EAs on his team who build the rules for each firm by hand, and the CPE eligible course Filed built with Miles Masterclass. David shares the story of generating forty demo signups in five minutes off a single industry webinar. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to get an accounting firm to trust AI with its clients.

What happens when your first product actually gains traction, and you have to decide whether to bet everything on it?

David Wyle is the founder of SurePrep, where he built one of the most widely used platforms in tax automation. Before that, he spent years in the trenches of early software development, cold calling pilot firms in 1997 and building ePACE, one of the first paperless audit tools to take hold in a profession that did not want to change.

Together they explore what product market fit actually looks like from the inside, the subtle signals that told David he was onto something before the market agreed with him, and the negotiation and leadership lessons that came from scaling a company through private equity involvement.

They also get into where automation and AI are actually headed in accounting, and why David does not believe the big firms are heading toward a quick rip and replace of their systems.

David built the Word and Excel integration using VBA that helped ePace win its early market, at a time when most of the industry still ran on paper. He also talks about his passion for history, lessons drawn from biblical leadership, and the story behind Casa Aurora, the house he bought in a fairly unorthodox way. Tune in for a conversation about what it takes to build disruptive technology inside one of the most conservative industries in business.