From a scrappy startup in Oklahoma to a billion‑dollar payroll powerhouse, Paycom’s story is a study in discipline, architecture, and uncomfortable choices: founder Chad Richison bootstrapped a single‑database HCM platform that quietly dismantled the messy, acquisition‑driven “Frankenstein” systems of the incumbents, only to intentionally undercut his own revenue with Beti, an employee‑driven payroll tool that erased costly errors—and the fees that came with them. The result is a classic innovator’s dilemma: a company that built a durable technical moat and sticky margins yet took a strategic hit—and a brutal Wall Street reaction—by choosing long‑term product truth over short‑term comfort. This piece weaves the origin story, the engineering strategy, the Beti pivot, and the bull‑vs‑bear stakes into a crisp narrative about what it takes to reshape an industry

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Transcript https://empor.top/us/PAYC

• I. Introduction: The "Oklahoma Standard"
• II. Context: The Frankenstein Problem
• III. The Founding: 1998 & The Dot-Com Survivor
• IV. The Architecture as Strategy
• V. The Golden Era: Sales, Scale, and Margins
• VI. The Innovator's Dilemma: The "Beti" Pivot
• VII. Power Analysis: 7 Powers & 5 Forces
• VIII. The Bull vs. Bear Case
• IX. Conclusion & Lessons
• X. Outro