For Bill.com, the pandemic has been more of a mixed bag. Companies have continued to sign up for the service, but growth of both customers and transactions has slowed as many small firms have been hit hard. Still, the business Lacerte has so doggedly built now enjoys what Warren Buffett would call a moat—meaning it’s hard for other startups to enter its niche. Getting overwhelmed small business owners to do anything new is tough, and Bill.
Fortunately, when he was sidelined at PayCycle, Lacerte was already hatching the idea for his next cloud business. He saw it as a massive timesaver for overworked small business owners—no more opening the mail, checking invoices, juggling when to pay which bill and then writing out, recording and reconciling checks by hand. In 2007, he paid $200,000 for the domain name Bill.com. He released his first product in 2008, targeting companies with $5 million to $100 million in revenue.
Slowly but surely, the partnerships have started paying off. In 2018, revenue hit $65 million. An April 2019 fundraising round finally valued Bill.com at more than $1 billion. Last December, Bill.com went public with a $1.6 billion valuation. On the first day of trading, shares jumped 60%. Still, despite his middle-aged, mild-numbers-guy demeanor, Lacerte had learned a lesson from his PayCycle ouster: to take firm control. “I realized that if I wasn’t going to make a big decision, no one will, so I need to make it.”hen the Covid stay-at-home era began, the need for an online bill payment service became even clearer.
Bill.com’s early investors August Capital and DCM have turned $25 million into $700 and $900 million, respectively.
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